Shylashri Shankar

Information, Access and Targeting: The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India

In this paper, the relationship is assessed between possessing information on, gaining access to and the efficacy of delivery of Indias national rural employment guarantee scheme (NREGA) in three states. The results suggest that the link between information, access and the delivery of the scheme is not straightforward. Information can increase the propensity for the programme to be accessed by those who are not its primary target population, and can enhance efficacy of delivery to such beneficiaries. Lack of information, on the other hand, decreases the ability of citizens, particularly the acutely poor, to benefit from the scheme.

Battling corruption : has NREGA reached India's rural poor?

In an attempt to respond to the needs of the countrys poor, the Indian government launched an ambitious workfare scheme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in 2005, which guaranteed hundred days of employment in unskilled manual labour at a minimum wage to every rural household each year. The book assesses the effectiveness of formal and informal mechanisms-political representation, community social audits, access to information, membership in networks, political competition-in reducing corrupt practices and enabling NREGA to reach its intended beneficiaries in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. The book tests several intuitions and finds that, among other things, political representation for scheduled castes and tribes, and women has produced dividends in the form of higher participation and higher earnings in the scheme by these groups. Low access to information, on the other hand, has hindered the effective functioning of these mechanisms. Written in non-technical language, it is one of the few studies of its kind that blends econometric and ethnographic analyses towards a better understanding of the effective implementation of the scheme. Available in OSO:

National rural employment guarantee programme in Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan: some recent evidence

This paper presents results on the participation of rural workers in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme based on a pilot survey of three villages in the Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh (AP), India. These villages are Kaligiri, Obulayyapale and Reddivaripalle, and they were surveyed in December 2007. In contrast to an earlier study of ours on Rajasthan, Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) participated in higher numbers in AP, but in both states these groups participated for slightly lower spells than the residual group of ‘Others’. We find that AP performed better than Rajasthan in terms of targeting poorer caste and income groups such as SCs, STs and landless households. The number of days worked on average was much higher than suggested by other assessments. Our econometric analysis further reinforces the view that disadvantaged groups are not only more likely to participate but also for longer spells. Thus the performance of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme has been far from dismal.

Is the Rule of Law an Antidote for Religious Tension? The Promise and Peril of Judicializing Religious Freedom

Although “rule of law” is often regarded as a solution for religious conflict, this article analyzes the role of legal processes and institutions in hardening boundaries and sharpening antagonisms among religious communities. Using case studies from Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, we highlight four specific mechanisms through which legal procedures, structures, and instruments can further polarize already existing religious conflicts. These mechanisms include the procedural requirements and choreography of litigation (Sri Lanka), the strategic use of legal language and court judgments by political and socioreligious groups (India), the activities of partisan activists who mobilize around litigation (Malaysia), and the exploitation of “public order” laws in contexts framed by antagonism targeting religious minorities (Pakistan).

A Juridical Voyage of “Essential Practices of Religion” From India to Malaysia and Pakistan

The article follows the voyage of the concept of “essential practices of religion,” which was created in India and later borrowed by judges in Pakistan and Malaysia. It explores whether concepts and the way they are used by judges transnationally, can be identified systematically to illluminate types of contestations over the nature of constitutional identities. It uses a tool of conceptual history, onomasiology, which refers to the tracing of all names and terms for the concept of “essential practices” in these judgments, to identify the network of concepts in the constitution within which “essential practices” is situated by each judgment to create a particular meaning and outcome for religious freedom in that country. State, religion, and rights are the three pivots for the debates. It demonstrates that it is possible to transcend the problem of translatability, by asking not whether “essential practices” (or any other concept) has the same meaning in all contexts (it does not), but whether a judge who wants to privilege a particular constitutional identity uses essential practices in a particular way within a network of concepts. This approach treats judges as interpreters who are embedded within specific social, historical, and political contexts, and who strategically use foreign case-law to impose their vision of the nation’s constitutional identity. The article’s conclusions problematize the transferability of concepts such as democracy, religious freedom, authority, and so on to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, among others.

Constitutionalism in Rough Seas: Balancing Religious Accommodation and Human Rights in, Through, and Despite, the Law

Introduction to a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist. The five articles included in the special issue highlight the various ways through which cultural, social, and political contexts affect the balance struck between rights protection and religious accommodation. The contributors accentuate the influence of domestic actors — key elites, courts, political parties, and civil society groups — in shaping the boundaries between the domains of religion and the state in constitutions, laws, and their interpretations, and the consequences of this boundary-drawing for religious polarization and rapprochement. Taken as a whole, the articles discuss the intended as well as the unintended consequences of the legal treatment, or even constitutionalization, of religion.

Switches Into and Out of NREGS: A Panel Data Analysis for Rajasthan

Indias National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has been hailed as one of the countrys most creative social initiatives. Since the program was begun only recently (in 2004-05) there is a need to assess its impact on households not just in one year but over time. To the best of our knowledge there are no studies of the latter kind. Using a unique panel data set for 2007-08 and 2009-10 for the Indian state of Rajasthan this paper analyzes the transitions into and out of the National Rural Employment Guarantee. It models the impact of such transitions on earnings of workers as well the determinants of such transitions. Several policy conclusions are also advanced.