In two Indian villages with the same government job guarantee, the programme strengthened workers' bargaining power in one but barely registered in the other—and the difference came down to local class relations. This matters because India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) is one of the world’s largest anti-poverty programmes, yet its effects vary wildly from village to village. The researcher’s doctoral work showed that outcomes depend not on programme design but on the local political economy: who owns land, who controls labour, and how those relationships interact with urban economies. The post-doctoral project digs deeper into why some villages see lasting improvements in collective worker action while others do not, and how rural transformation is shaped by the growing entanglement of village and city economies. If this research succeeds, it will give policymakers a concrete, place-based framework for understanding why social programmes succeed or fail. Rather than assuming a single policy works everywhere, governments could tailor implementation to local power structures—potentially making large-scale anti-poverty spending far more effective. The work is fundamental social science, but with direct implications for how public money is spent on rural development across the Global South.
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The proposed project builds on the research agenda started during my doctoral research, which focussed on the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Schemes (NREGS) in India. The doctoral research used a comparative political economy approach to studying the implementation of social programmes, its outcomes and transformative impacts in four villages in socio-politically and historically distinct regions of Karnataka, a south Indian state. The multi-sited research design involved household-level Census surveys and qualitative interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019. The doctoral research found that the implementation of the social programme varied from one location to the other because it was structured by the (local) political economy. The comparative case demonstrated how the outcomes of the social programme were structured by the social relations of production. It also found that the implementation of the social programme had transformative impacts on these relations, which led to improvements in the bargaining power of labour and its capacity to act collectively in pursuit of shared interests. These impacts were also found to be differentiated across time. It was argued in the thesis that processes of transformation were contingent on a dynamic interaction between struggles in the capital-labour relation and the relations that structure the distribution of public resources (or the social programme). In the post-doctoral research project, I wish to take forward this research agenda by focusing on the implications of these findings for rural transformation. The empirical findings on the implementation of the social programme will be further analysed to understand the changing political economy of different rural contexts in India. The comparative cases used in the doctoral research showed that the potential (and limits) of transformation were defined in dynamic ways by the interaction of the socio-economic structure of the village and its integration with the wider economy. That is, transformative processes in villages were shaped by the fact that the political economy of the ‘rural’ is changing, owing to its increasing interactions with the ‘urban’. However, the rural remains important given two in three Indians continue to live in villages. These processes then are also shaped by the socio-economic structure of the villages, which, notwithstanding ongoing processes of economic change (or differentiation), remains deeply stratified and unequal. The interplay of these dynamic and complex processes, and its implication for rural politics, is explored in this post-doctoral project.
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