Policy making in India: A dynamic process of statecraft

Pacific Affairs

Volumn 84, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 89-107

  Chopra, Deepta ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

India; Policy making; Politics; State; Statecraft

Indexed keywords

EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS; EMPLOYMENT; IDEOLOGY; POLICY MAKING; POLITICS; SOCIAL POLICY; STATE LED DEVELOPMENT; STRATEGIC APPROACH;

INDIA;

EID: 79952916758     PISSN: 0030851X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5509/201184189     Document Type: Article

References (103)

1. Bob Jessop, State power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008);
2. Bob Jessop, "The State and Power," in Sage Handbook of Power, eds. Stewart R. Clegg and Mark Haugaard (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2009).
3. Christopher John Fuller and Veronica Benei, The everyday state and society in modern India (London: Hurst and Company, 2001);
4. Akhil Gupta, "Blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics and the imagined state," American Ethnologist 22 (1995): 375-402.
5. This point is reiterated by Rai (1996) in viewing the "state not as signifying a unity of structure and power...[but] to describe a network of power relations existing in cooperation and also in tension." Shirin M Rai, "Women and the State in the Third World: Some Issues for Debate," in Women and the State: International Perspectives, eds. Shirin M. Rai and Geraldine Lievesley (London: Taylor and Francis, 1996), 5.
6. The name of the policy has been changed in 2009 to Mahatma Gandhi NREGA or MGNREGA, however, it is commonly known as the NREGA as used in this paper.
7. Joe Painter, "Prosaic geographies of stateness," Political Geography 25 (2006): 752-774.
8. Timothy Mitchell, "The limits of the State: beyond statist approaches and their critics," The American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 77-96.
9. Painter, "Prosaic geographies."
10. Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries."
11. Other understandings of the state include neo-Marxist perspectives (see Anupam Sen), and critiques of the state by feminist authors (see Pringle and Watson, 1992; Rai and Lievesley, 1996).
12. Although interesting, these fall beyond the scope of this article. Anupam Sen, The State, Industrialization and Class Formations in India (Routledge and Kegan-Paul, 1982).
13. Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson, "Women's Interests and the Post-Structuralist state," in Destabilizing Theory, eds. Michelle Barrett and Anne Phillipps (Cambridge: Cambridge Polity, 1992).
14. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
15. John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984).
16. Paul Sabatier and Hans Jenkins-Smith, Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).
17. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, "On the road towards a more adequate understanding of the state," in Bringing the state back in, eds. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
18. Peter Evans, Embedded autonomy: states and industrial transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
19. Christopher John Fuller and John Harriss, "For an anthropology of the modern Indian state," in The everyday state, 3.
20. Fuller and Harris (2001) also critique this view for assuming that the state is a neutral arbitrator of public interest, especially in pluralist accounts where there are a large number of interest groups at play.
21. Fuller and Harriss, "For an Anthropology," 15.
22. Fuller and Benei, The Everyday State;
23. Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries."
24. Painter, "Prosaic Geographies," 753.
25. James Scott, Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
26. Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and Rene Veron, Seeing the state: governance and governmentality in India, Contemporary South Asia series, vol. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
27. Fuller and Benei, The Everyday State, 22-23.
28. Ralph Miliband, The state in capitalist society (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969);
29. Nicos Poulantzas, State, power, socialism (London: New Left Books, 1974).
30. Philip Abrams, "Notes on the difficulty of studying the state," Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (1988 (1977)): 58-89.
31. Michael Foucault, "Governmentality," in The Foucault Effect: studies in governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), 87-104.
32. Abrams, "Difficulty of studying the state," 61.
33. Mitchell, "Limits of the State," 94.
34. Mitchell, "Limits of the State," 95.
35. Corbridge et al., Seeing the State.
36. Mitchell, "Limits of the State," 94.
37. Corbridge et al., Seeing the State.
38. Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss, Reinventing India. liberalization, Hindu nationalism and popular democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
39. Thomas Blom-Hansen, "Governance and myths of state in Mumbai," in The everyday state, 32.
40. Weber argues that states are compulsory associations claiming control over territories and the people within them. His idea of an autonomous bureaucracy is based on highly selective meritocratic recruitment, strict selection process and competency subject to rules and authority. Max Weber, Economy and society: an outline of interpretive sociology (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968).
41. This notion of state autonomy has been studied in the Indian context by Anupam Sen, who argues that contrary to the traditional Marxist class theory of the state, which posits the state as a means of class hegemony, the Indian state has been able to play an autonomous role vis-à-vis the social classes because of the nature of the mode of production. This paper questions this autonomy through a case study of policy making.
42. Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the state back in: strategies of analysis in current research," in Bringing the state back in, 9.
43. Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: studying how societies and states transform and constitute one another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
44. Migdal, State in Society, 17.
45. Pranab K. Bardhan, The Political economy of development in India (Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 1984);
46. Francine R. Frankel, India's Political Economy 1947-2004, The gradual revolution (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005);
47. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, In pursuit of Lakshmi: the political economy of the Indian state (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
48. Peter Evans, "Embedded Autonomy";
49. Peter Evans, "Introduction: development strategies across the public-private divide," in State-Society synergy: government and social capital in development, ed. Peter Evans (California: University of California Press, 1997).
50. Evans, "Introduction: development strategies."
51. Mitchell, "Limits of the State," 77.
52. Evans, "Embedded Autonomy."
53. Abrams, "Difficulty of Studying the State."
54. Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries."
55. Barbara Harriss-White, India working: essays on society and economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
56. Fuller and Benei, The Everyday State.
57. Rene Véron, Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams and Manoj Srivastava, "The everyday state and political society in eastern India: structuring access to the Employment Assurance Scheme," Journal of Development Studies 39, no. 5 (2003): 1-28.
58. Blom-Hansen, "Governance and Myths of State."
59. Kirsty McNay, Jeemol Unni and Robert Cassen, "Employment," in Twenty-first century India. Population, economy, human development and the environment, eds. Tim Dyson, Robert Cassen and Leela Visaria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
60. Philip O'Keefe and Robert Palacios, "Strengthening Employment and Social Security for unorganized sector workers in India," in Globalization, Labor Markets and Inequality in India, eds. Dipak Mazumdar and Sandip Sarkar (London and New York, Routledge/IDRC, 2008).
61. Government of Maharashtra, Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Act (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1977).
62. Government of India, "National Common Minimum Programme," New Delhi, 2004.
63. Registered in the Indian Supreme Court as "PUCL vs. Union of India and Others, Writ Petition (Civil) 196 of 2001," in Right To Food Campaign Secretariat, ed., Supreme Court orders on the Right to Food: a tool for action, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Right to Food Campaign, 2008).
64. Indian National Congress, "Manifesto 2004," New Delhi, 2004.
65. "National Advisory Council to meet in July," The Hindu, 26 June 2004.
66. NAC press release, 31 July, New Delhi, 2004.
67. NAC, "Communications to government: Employment Guarantee Bill" (New Delhi, 2004).
68. PMO, "Letter to MORD regarding NREG Bill," (New Delhi: Government of India, 2004)
69. The two main grounds of concern were regarding the open-endedness of the financial implications of the program (through allowing state governments to decide the wage rate in a centrally funded program), and a concern that an untargeted approach would involve a huge outlay on the public exchequer (MORD file notings, New Delhi: Government of India, 2004). These were addressed with the central government retaining some measure of control over the wage rates under section 6 of the act. The act was also initially restricted to providing household entitlements to only BPL families. However, in later (and intense) negotiations, the BPL clause was removed, with the assurance that self-targeting (hard manual work, low wages) would prevent a large drain on public resources.
70. Government of India, "Minutes of meeting of Group of Ministers August 5," (New Delhi, 2005).
71. Jean Dreze and Aruna Roy, "Letter to Sonia Gandhi regarding dilutions in NREG Bill November 3," (New Delhi: National Advisory Council, 2004). The most significant of these "dilutions" included a restriction of eligible beneficiaries to BPL households, implementation in specific districts without time-bound extension to the whole of India as well as an on-off switch which would enable the act to be withdrawn if instances of corruption were found.
72. Ghulam Nabi Azad, "Letter regarding government business to Raghuvansh Prasad Singh," (New Delhi: Ministry of Parliamentary, Government of India, 2004).
73. Respondent T1, interview with author, tape recording (New Delhi, 17 March 2007).
74. Henceforth referred to in the article as the Standing Committee.
75. MORD, "Standing Committee report on 'The National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill,'" New Delhi: Standing Commission on Rural Development, Lok Sabha Secretariat, 2005.
76. PAEG, "Minutes for meetings, January 8 and January 9," New Delhi: People's Action for Employment Guarantee, 2005.
77. A yatra is a journey using various modes of transport, often undertaken as a popular mobilization strategy to garner public support. The Rozgar Adhikar Yatra (Journey for Employment Rights) was carried out on a bus, covering a pre-planned route, relying on support of local organizations and counterparts for logistics and organizing public meetings.
78. PAEG, "Jan Manch on Employment Guarantee: summary report," New Delhi: Peoples Action for Employment Guarantee, 2005.
79. The English-language media had mainly been opposing the act on the grounds that it would mean money down the drain with such activities as merely digging up holes and filling them up being unproductive, too expensive for the government's limited resources, and a drain on the public exchequer. See Shankar Acharya, "Guaranteeing jobs or a fiscal crisis?" Business Standard, 30 November 2004;
80. Surjit Singh Bhalla, "Ten lies and an Act: Part 1, 2 and 3," Business Standard, 25 December 2004. These writings were countered by civil society actors arguing for the need for employment, demonstrating the fiscal viability of such an act, and above all, critiquing the government for falling short of its commitments as set out in the NCMP.
81. See Jayati Ghosh, "Rural Employment as a policy priority," Frontline 2.4, 3-16 July 2004;
82. Smita Gupta, "Promises to keep," Frontline 21.6, 31 December 2004;
83. Jean Dreze, "Unemployment Guarantee Bill," The Hindu, 31 December 2004.
84. NAC, "Minutes of various meetings," New Delhi, 2004-05;
85. NAC, "Letter to MORD for GOM meeting," New Delhi, 2005;
86. NAC, "Letter to PMO regarding concerns in MORD NREG Bill," New Delhi, 2005.
87. MORD Standing Committee report. This report reiterated the importance of removing the restriction of beneficiaries to only BPL households, reinstating the irreversibility clause (removal of on-off switch), providing minimum wages to workers, and a time-bound extension for implementation. The report even went further to argue for individual-level entitlement (rather than household level), and provision of work for disabled workers.
88. GOI, "Text of Lok Sabha debates (August 18-22)," New Delhi: Lok sabha Secretariat, 2005.
89. These tenets included rewording of the minimum wage clause, removal of the on-off switch thereby making the act irreversible, removal of the BPL restriction, and reservations for women workers.
90. A place just outside Parliament, it is popular with civil society groups as a protest site, attracting media coverage and publicity.
91. MORD, "Amendment to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill, 2004-ex-post-facto approval of Cabinet," New Delhi: Department of Rural Development, 2005.
92. Of these, the most significant was that relating to minimum wages, which the activists managed to get reworded during the last couple of hours through informal links, but these changes were far from satisfactory. Other provisions that were "given away" included the act providing a guarantee for only 100 days, and that, too, at the household level rather than an individual entitlement.
93. Kumar Venkateshwarlu, "National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in place," The Hindu, 3 February 2005.
94. Identification of the initial 200 districts was done within the Planning Commission using a report listing the most backward districts. See Rohini Nayyar, Identification of districts for wage and self employment programmes (New Delhi: Planning Commission Task Force, 2003). The Planning Commission also worked out the financial implications and budget calculations for the program.
95. MORD, "File Notings," (New Delhi: Department of Rural Development, 2005).
96. MORD, "Letter from MORD to Planning Commission," New Delhi, 9 February 2007.
97. GOI, "Rajya Sabha Question No 157: 'NREGA in North Eastern States,'" (New Delhi: Rajya Sabha Secretariat, 2 August 2006).
98. "3 days into job, Rahul extends NREGA to nation," IBN Live, 2007.
99. Partha Chatterjee, "Development planning and the Indian state," in State and politics in India, ed. Partha Chatterjee (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
100. Respondent C1, interview with author, tape recording, Rajasthan,10 March 2007.
101. Sonia Gandhi, "Govern With Commitment," Congress President's Opening Speech at 3rd Conference of Congress Chief Ministers, Guwahati, 12 April 2002.
102. Mitchell, "Limits of the State."
103. Respondent C3, interview with author, tape recording, New Delhi, 22 March 2007.