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.
