State Debt and the Rural

Two Historical Moments in India

The distribution of famine relief in 1877 in Madras, India. From the Illustrated London News (1877). Image courtesy of Wikimedia commons

Discussions on debt, especially in the context of the state, are commonly drenched in economism. My interest lies in retrieving a somewhat different understanding of debt as that which is owed by one entity to the other for a whole raft of reasons not limited to the economic even if encompassing it. How, for instance, might we understand the varying debts the Indian state professes to owe her rural populace at distinct historical junctures? At what moments does the state acquire a sense of obligation to particular sections of its rural citizenry? And through what specific rationality and technique does it attempt to discharge this debt? To probe this notion of debt further, I analyse two state policies in India separated from each other in time by more than a century. What unites them is that they both address forms of rural distress through the generation of employment for the rural citizen as manual labour on public works. The first policy is the Famine Codes constructed by the British colonial state in the 1880s and the second is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) passed through unanimous consent in the Indian Parliament in 2005. Both the NREGA and the Famine Codes have been described, by their drafters and proponents, as embodying a radical discharge of state obligation to the Rural.

To Not Let Die

India witnessed a series of calamitous famines in the 19th century particularly in 1866 and 1876-8. The famine death rates of the latter half of the 19th century in India remain disputed with estimates entering tens of millions. In 1880 a Famine Commission was established by the British colonial state to study and make recommendations on the management of famines in India. The precise causes for the establishment of this Commission continue to be debated. They include the need to demonstrate the legitimacy of imperial administration, the desire to preserve political stability as well as the revenue base, humanitarian concern, events that were taking place in England at the same time (the enactment of the New Poor Law, similar debates on policies in Ireland), and popular pressure in England itself emanating from the news of the large number of mortalities in India. The Famine Commission’s recommendations were subsequently formulated into the Famine Codes of 1884. Another commission on famines in India succinctly captures the principles underlying the Codes:

The Commission of 1880 recognised to the full the obligation imposed on the State to offer to the necessitous the means of relief in times of famine. But it was the cardinal principle of their policy that this relief should be so administered, as not to check the growth of thrift and self-reliance among the people… (Report of the Commission on Famine in India, 1901: 3).

The 1880 commission articulated the belief that the state had an obligation to step in during periods of famines and proposed to do so through the organisation of massive public works. This measure would provide employment at subsistence wages and at a reasonable distance from the homes to all those who applied for it. Wages were to be paid in cash, and public employment was directed to the creation of public assets such as roads and canals. In addition there was a provision for “gratuitous” or “charitable relief” for those incapable of work, in the form of doles or kitchens. This provision complemented public works to form the core of famine relief measures but it was emphasised that “the great object of saving life and giving protection from extreme suffering may not only be as well secured, but in fact will be far better secured, if proper care be taken to prevent the abuse and demoralization which all experience shows to be the consequence of ill-directed and excessive distribution of charitable relief” (Report of the Commission on Famine in India, 1901: 3).

The debt the colonial state appeared to owe the famished in the latter half of the 19th century —what they repeatedly call the “duty of the state”—is quite unambiguously to keep mortality as low as possible or to not-let-die. In the act of not letting die it was important to exercise efficiency and strict economy. If one had to choose between financial costs to the state and not letting die, the former was accorded greater significance. The objective of protecting state finances played a leading role in the disastrous Bengal famine of 1943, which killed an estimated 3 million people. This famine was never actually officially declared a famine for a variety of reasons, with a prime one being the heavy financial burden an invocation of the Famine Codes would have placed on the treasury.

To Let-Live

At the end of the 1970s (about 30 years after independence from British rule in 1947), public works programmes were to witness a resurgence in India. From this time onwards they morphed into an answer for the recalcitrant issue of endemic malnourishment and chronic poverty in rural India. Public works scheme followed public works scheme with minor tweaking undertaken to their finer points. The objective of all these schemes was the same: to “pull” or “lift” people out of poverty through employment on public works and repayment in the forms of wages or food or, sometimes, both. These were targeted programmes with beneficiaries being screened for eligibility on the basis of measures such as age, gender, caste, class, income, region and size of landholdings. There were large outlays devoted to this central strategy of rural development by the Indian state in subsequent five-year plans. In 2005 public works programs for rural India witnessed what is often described as a “revolution” with the enactment of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). This law is aimed at the provision of livelihood security of rural households by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in every financial year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Enshrinement into the Indian Constitution is meant to confer legal rights onto the entire rural populace—73% of India’s 1.2 billion population—who can now demand “the right to work” off the state instead of pleading for state largesse. Further, this law’s coverage is universal so now all rural citizens can avail its benefits instead of just targeted sections such as those officially classified as poor. In 2009, NREGA was renamed Mahatma Gandhi NREGA or MGNREGA after the father of the nation. This association with Gandhi is part of the elevation of NREGA to becoming a core poverty alleviation strategy by the Indian state.

In the 1970s and 80s development schemes in India operated through notions and imageries of patriarchal state munificence. After the Indian economy’s liberalization in 1991 there was a stronger focus on improved effectiveness of development programs through better service delivery and increased targeting. NREGA emerges as a shiny new product of the seductive market ideology of a rapidly and stridently liberalizing state. Idioms of the market – buyers and sellers, productivity, and entrepreneurialism—inform the authoritative texts of the NREGA. Villagers, in this legislation, are reconfigured as self-propulsive actors who demand work from the state. The state, in turn, supplies work in a fair and rational exchange. Minimum wages shall be paid for nine hours of work through which items termed “productive assets” shall be created in the concerned village. As the prime minister made clear in his inaugural speech: “NREGA is a unique social safety net because its beneficiaries are not passive recipients, but will become active participants in the creation of rural assets” (http://nrega.nic.in/Speech.htm). In brief, this law aims to eliminate rural poverty in India by creating a regime of rights, through processes of empowerment, transparency and accountability, by bringing neglected populations into the warm embrace of the national economy, by opening up the rural market, and imparting financial literacy to the rural poor.

State Debts Then and Now

The historical contrasts between the Famine Codes and NREGA are instructive when viewed through the prism of state debt. The former are invoked in periods of famines and are pulled back as soon as the crisis passes. The latter can legally be invoked at any point by any rural citizen of India herself. The Famine Codes did not want to demoralize the poor by giving them gratuitous relief. Similarly NREGA expounds on the benefits of hard and productive labour to enable India to move towards becoming, as an advertisement puts it, a “republic of work”. Both the colonial British and the contemporary Indian state are obsessed with the maintenance of “economy” in fulfilling their obligations, but the meaning of economy is varied. For the colonial power, economy simply meant keeping the overall bill to the state at an absolute minimum. At the time NREGA’s passage, concerns were expressed about its budget but, interestingly, the allocated funds have remained underutilized year on year. Present-day India’s overriding concern is, in fact, to fix corruption of its own agents; what is euphemistically described as “leakages” in the state system itself. Both the policies under discussion are aimed at managing certain key statistics – mortalities for one and poverty levels for the other – that have swollen to embarrassing proportions. The former is aimed at not letting scores of people die as the state sits by idly, whereas the latter hopes to create a space that would allow rural citizens to (just about) live on with ever so slightly more.

Nayanika Mathur is a postdoctoral research fellow in anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her monograph detailing the bureaucratic practices through which NREGA was endowed with a reality by the Indian state is currently under review.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/05/03/state-debt-and-the-rural/