Chasing Rights in Delhi: Social Movements and the National Food Security Act

Abstract

In the 2000s, “rights-based approaches” to development acquired prominence in national level social policy in India. From 2005 to 2013, the Indian parliament passed several laws that effectively created new legal “rights.” This included a national legislation on the “right to work” under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) enacted in 2005 and a National Food Security Act (NFSA) on the “right to food” enacted in 2013. In text, rights created under these legislations expanded the idea of citizenship by defining justiciable claims that could be made against the state. The enactment of these legislations drew on a history of collective action and litigation centered on constitutional law and created the possibility of a new, progressive politics. Yet this positive expansion of citizenship rights has in recent years encountered a backlash and a de facto reigning in of rights. Part of this erosion of rights has been due to the Aadhaar based digital technologies using biometrics that were introduced as a key tool of implementation of social protection programs implemented under laws such as the NREGA and NFSA. Despite the present context of Aadhaar based erosion of citizenship rights, and the specter of coded and precarious citizenship, this paper argues that challenges to implementation of social policy need to be viewed in perspective. The role of social movements has been fundamental to the emergence of the aforementioned policies and legislations. Moving forward, the role of civil society actors in demanding probity in implementation of social policy, and in the reclaiming of citizenship, is critical for ensuring that new rights legislations retain their progressive potential.