Mobilizing for the Right to Work: The Politics of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)

CASI Seminar
Rob Jenkins
Professor of Political Science, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)
Center for the Advanced Study of India
3600 Market Street, Suite 560 (5th floor)
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104

About the Speaker:
Rob Jenkins is a Professor of Political Science, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). He is the coeditor (with Loraine Kennedy and Partha Mukhopadhyay) of Power Policy and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones (Delhi: Oxford, 2014), and is the coauthor of a forthcoming monograph: Rob Jenkins and James Manor, Politics and the Right to Work: India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (London: Hurst, 2016).

About the Lecture:
February 2016 marks a decade since India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA) came into force. Politics has infused almost every aspect of NREGA – its design, the process by which the Act has been implemented, and efforts over the years to reform its rules and procedures. The intensely political nature of NREGA has continued from the Manmohan Singh government (2004-14), which introduced NREGA, to the current government of Narendra Modi, which has overseen its execution over the past two years. A careful analysis of NREGA’s political dimensions – as expressed at the local, state, and national levels – yields important insights concerning the nature of the Indian state, the significance of the country’s rights-based approach to promoting human development, and the difficulties inherent in tracking the effects of policy change on such complex phenomena as political clientelism and democratic decentralization. 

[Event Flyer]

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.