Implications
This chapter advances six arguments concerning the relationship between Indian politics and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA): NREGA, for all its faults, has improved the well-being of tens of millions of poor people; (2) NREGA's political aims and implications must be recognized to appreciate its significance as a development initiative; (3) while the Indian state's porousness provides privileged access to business organizations and socially powerful constituencies, it also offers openings for voices seeking to effect progressive social change in the interests of non-elite groups; (4) various aspects of NREGA implementation have demonstrated the complex process through which “clientelist” politics in India is being transformed rather than eliminated; (5) NREGA is emblematic of a new category of rights—a category we term “governance rights”, which are characterized by hybridity in terms of both content and enforcement mechanisms; and (6) NREGA spurred a devolution of resources to elected local councils, which made village-level democratic institutions, despite their shortcomings, a site where poorer people's demands for accountability were legitimated—a process aided in some states by unusually capable social movements, and in others by state bureaucracies.