India’s New Deal

On a recent morning in a village in eastern India, Hirya Devi, a rail-thin woman in a tangerine sari, told a crowd of a few hundred poor laborers how she came to participate in the largest employment program in human history.

By Daniel Pepper

October 1, 2009, 6:15 PM

On a recent morning in a village in eastern India, Hirya Devi, a rail-thin woman in a tangerine sari, told a crowd of a few hundred poor laborers how she came to participate in the largest employment program in human history. For two months last year, Devi worked on a government-funded well construction project as part of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which promises 100 days of employment each year to the head of every rural household. Since the program began in 2006, 90 million Indians have been temporarily put to work, usually on road and well construction projects, earning minimum wages of about $1.60 a day.

On a recent morning in a village in eastern India, Hirya Devi, a rail-thin woman in a tangerine sari, told a crowd of a few hundred poor laborers how she came to participate in the largest employment program in human history. For two months last year, Devi worked on a government-funded well construction project as part of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which promises 100 days of employment each year to the head of every rural household. Since the program began in 2006, 90 million Indians have been temporarily put to work, usually on road and well construction projects, earning minimum wages of about $1.60 a day.

The program isn’t simply extraordinary because of its scale — though, incredibly, it could affect nearly 70 percent of India’s 1.1 billion citizens. What makes the program truly exceptional is its transparency. Regular, public reviews of all documents — wage cards and bank records, engineers’ reports and work completion papers, for example — ensure that laborers are being paid fairly. If shady practices occur, villagers like Devi can air their grievances at village meetings.

For many of India’s rural poor, access to regular work is a life-changing development. "It’s not the end of poverty," says Jean Drèze, one of India’s most famous social activists and a chief architect of the program, "but it means the kind of extreme insecurity that people live in today is basically not there anymore."

What’s more, the program’s attempts at accountability represent a radical, game-changing agenda in a country where local politicians and businessmen often collude for kickbacks. As such, there has been a fair amount of backlash from local leaders, who contend that public access to documents challenges their authority. Many villagers complain bitterly that the program itself has become corrupt.

That’s what brought Devi to the front of the crowd that morning. After two months of hard work, she had been denied her wages by a thieving contractor. "I’m an old woman," Devi explained. "I don’t have money to go run after government officials." Although the top district official listened patiently, Devi likely won’t receive her lost wages. No one expects such a large government program to be free of corruption overnight, but the fact that a chauffeur-driven bureaucrat showed up to listen to poor villagers surely suggests that men and women like Devi are learning they are entitled to more than just a handout. — Daniel Pepper