Every researcher and evaluator who has been criticising MNREGA by narrowing their analysis to implementation failures, delivery gaps, or administrative inefficiencies, without first understanding and acknowledging its core political and economic purpose, has made a grave political error, and in doing so has compromised research itself.
MNREGA: a system-correction mechanism, not just a welfare project
MNREGA has been reduced to a project to be “optimised”, even though it was designed as a system-level intervention to correct deep distortions in labour markets. When evaluators reduce it to a checklist exercise, they do not merely misunderstand the programme; they actively participate in a narrative that presents MNREGA as expendable, inefficient, and replaceable.
The error becomes more serious when the same evaluators speak glowingly about development-aid-led livelihood programmes, public health interventions, anti-trafficking initiatives, and mental-health projects in rural areas, while treating MNREGA as peripheral or poorly executed. Many of these interventions stand on the foundation that MNREGA created - stabilised wages, reduced desperation, improved bargaining power, and income security.
To celebrate downstream outcomes while erasing the upstream condition that made them possible is not methodological rigour; it is analytical amnesia. That erasure has political consequences.
Criticising MNREGA in this manner is no different from attacking trade unions for being “ineffective” for informal workers without understanding the essence of trade unionism. Trade unions are not grievance redress mechanisms; their primary role is to shape laws, norms, and power relations across the labour market. The same logic applies to the reservation system. These institutions exist to correct historical and structural injustice, not to deliver tidy, individualised results that fit neatly into evaluation frameworks.
MNREGA, like trade unions, is a system-correction mechanism. It was never meant to be judged by how many individuals it neatly benefits or how efficiently it performs on paper. Its purpose lies elsewhere: in stabilising rural wages, rebalancing labour markets, strengthening the bargaining power of unorganised workers, enabling survival without distress migration, and quietly but decisively weakening the grip of contractors, middlemen, and traffickers on the lives of the poor. These outcomes do not always show up in logframes or impact tables, but they reshape reality on the ground.
MNREGA is perhaps the one public policy that the business class and landed elites have consistently disliked. That alone should tell us something about its power.
Why elites hate MNREGA and why that should alarm us
Just a few days ago in Malaysia, when someone asked me what one solution countries should adopt to address the crisis of migrant workers, my answer was immediate: emulate India’s MNREGA. If there is one scheme that has decisively tilted the economy in a pro-poor direction, it is this.
First, NREGA is universal. It is not caste-specific, not charity-based, not discretionary. It recognises work as a right. Second, at its core, NREGA is about stabilising wages in the labour market. It is arguably the strongest minimum wage legislation India has ever had in practice. The ability to hire labour below NREGA wages is restricted. That wage floor has fundamentally changed bargaining power at the bottom of the economy.
Further, MNREGA is one of the largest anti-caste and anti-patriarchy labour programmes in modern India. Landlords and dominant castes can no longer extract labour in exchange for leftover food or rice. They now have to pay wages. That shift is political, not merely economic.
Business interests have had their eyes on this law from the very beginning. Their complaint has always been the same: “We don’t get workers anymore.” What they really mean is: “Workers have become stubborn. They raise their eyes. They are no longer obedient.” Imagine the shock! An unorganised worker acquired bargaining power once reserved for unionised labour.
This hostility exposes the myopic understanding of the economy that dominates corporate thinking. Even a basic Keynesian insight would show that MNREGA ensures purchasing power at the bottom of the pyramid.
From migration and trafficking to health and climate: the invisible backbone
International financial institutions once criticised MNREGA for “suppressing migration.” Today, the same scheme stands as India’s invisible social security system for migrant workers. MNREGA works not by helping individuals escape poverty, but by preventing poverty from being weaponised.
MNREGA is one of the most powerful anti-trafficking legislations India has ever enacted. By guaranteeing a fallback wage, it weakens the coercive power of contractors, middlemen, and traffickers. It also enables migrants to leave their spouses and families behind with at least some assured income to survive. In doing so, it reduces desperation-led migration of entire families.
It also guarantees income security that directly affects health outcomes. When wages are assured, people can afford food, medicines, and basic care. In this way, NREGA functions as a de facto right to health, long before such language became fashionable in policy circles.
The role of MNREGA in ensuring rights-based climate adaptation also cannot be ignored. Through gram sabhas, communities determine whether they need lakes desilted, check dams built, or water-harvesting and flood-control structures repaired. These decisions shape where MNREGA funds are allocated, while simultaneously supporting communities to adapt to future droughts or manage floods.
This decentralised, democratic approach to climate resilience is something that top-down employment or climate schemes will never be able to fulfil.
How evaluation frameworks have failed MNREGA: a message to researchers
Health research has often committed the same error: evaluating nutrition, mental health, and public health outcomes in isolation, while treating MNREGA as background noise rather than as a central determinant of health security. This fragmentation allows credit to be claimed downstream while the structural source of resilience remains invisible.
When evaluators ignore these functions, they repeat the same set of errors: they treat structural interventions as time-bound projects, confuse efficiency metrics with social outcomes, and exclude power from economic analysis. These are not neutral mistakes. They shape funding decisions, policy redesigns, and public narratives.
Today, much of what is happening to MNREGA is justified using the very evaluation frameworks that failed to grasp what the programme actually does.
Researchers and evaluators need to wake up now. Evaluations must be reworked and rewritten with these realities as starting points, not afterthoughts. Because when a programme that protects the poorest is dismantled using your indicators, your categories, and your reports, the consequences will not be abstract. Responsibility will not be abstract either. The stains will be on your hands.
Edited by Parth Sharma
Image by Janvi Bokoliya
