Contentious politics of welfare in rural India: The interplay between the Maoist insurgency and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act

Abstract

This paper examines whether the Indian government used the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) to counter the radical mobilization of rural poor by the Maoist Naxalite movement. Employing an original district-level dataset from 2006 to 2014 and the GLOCON database on political events, it adopts a quasi-experimental method to analyze the strategy's effectiveness. The findings suggest that the government targeted districts with higher rural mobilization using NREGA as a counter-insurgency tool. However, the Naxalites effectively countered this strategy. Analysis of journals from the factions Liberation and People's March shows that the Naxalites actively claimed benefits under NREGA, transforming it from a containment tool to a governmental concession. This study concludes that the government's strategy was unsuccessful due to the effective counter-strategy by the Naxalites.