The great recalibration: MGNREGS and the shifting contours of power in India’s agrarian labour markets

Abstract

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has fundamentally reshaped rural India’s labour relations, transcending its safety-net origins. This article argues that its transformative power lies not in uniform national impact, but in its role as an institutional accelerant within India’s divergent agrarian transitions. Analysing four distinct agrarian regimes, this study demonstrates how MGNREGS recalibrates power—breaking semi-feudal bondage, catalysing capitalist mechanization, supporting smallholder persistence, and buffering tribal dispossession. These regionally specific transformations reveal a complex interplay wherein the state policy both challenges and is constrained by existing agrarian structures, reshaping the political economy of work, wages, and social hierarchy across India’s heterogeneous countryside. The analysis contributes to theoretical debates on agrarian change by demonstrating that social protection programmes do not operate on a tabula rasa but are mediated by—and in turn reshape—underlying class relations, production systems, and historical trajectories. In so doing, it advances a relational understanding of state-society interaction that moves beyond both neoliberal and structuralist accounts of agrarian transition.