The Politics of Labour Policy in XXI Century India: A Gramscian Perspective - POLIs
Partecipanti al progetto
- Adduci Matilde (Responsabile)
Descrizione del progetto
Abstract
The shift from the Washington consensus to the post-Washington consensus (PWC) in the late 1990s and, subsequently, the emergence of the paradigm of Inclusive Growth (IG) have placed a new emphasis on social protection policies for the vulnerable strata of the population in developing countries. Consistently with the consolidation of a socially sensitive mainstream approach to development, in 2005 India introduced the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). This employment scheme has been subsequently recognized by the World Bank as one of the largest social safety net programmes in the Global South and a as a driver of inclusive growth. POLIs aims at investigating a) the politics of NREGA, focusing the political mediations, tensions and conflicts between different actors that accompanied at the all-India level the elaboration of the scheme and its subsequent revisions, as well as the allocations of funds for its implementation; b) the politics of subaltern social strata coalesced around NREGA, with specific attention to the period from 2014 to the present, characterized by an increasing downsizing of the scheme, both in terms of funding and curtailing of workers entitlements, under the ruling Hindu nationalist-led coalition. In so doing, POLIs will thus contribute to fill a critical gap in the – otherwise vast – literature on the scheme. However, a comprehensive analysis of the politics of NREGA should not neglect a critical theoretical engagement with the broader context of the international development paradigms that informed the scheme. In this respect, POLIs intends in the first instance to push beyond its boundaries the theoretical debate on the PWC and IG paradigms, analysing their social policy agenda in the light of the Gramscian concept of ‘integral state’. This will provide an original conceptual framework, which will be utilized to interrogate of the politics of NREGA.