Democratic Politics and Legal Rights: Employment guarantee and food security in India

This paper focusses on two Indian laws that seek to guarantee socioeconomic rights: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), an important example of India’s recent history of legislation of social and economic rights, and the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA), currently in Parliament. Various means of democratic politics, including a ten-year old public interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court and public mobilisation through the ‘Right to Food Campaign’, contributed to the emergence of socioeconomic rights (in this case the right to food and work) on the agenda of mainstream politics. It attempts to shed some light on how the concerns of marginalised groups can find space in mainstream politics despite an overall political environment that is not particularly conducive. The paper analyses the parallels between the NREGA and the National Food Security Bill (NFSB) and contrasts the ‘successful’ enactment of the NREGA within two years with the slow movement on the NFSB tabled only in the third year of the second term. The developments around the food security law show that a favourable outcome cannot be taken for granted even though it may be perceived as a ‘populist’ measure.