Gender, Social Protection, and Crises of Social Reproduction: Contextualizing NREGA

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of social protection programs such as India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). And yet, acute crises such as pandemics are layered upon existing inequalities of gender and caste in India. We show that a distinctive feature of twenty-first-century Indian capitalism is a restructuring of the caste-gender division of labor in rural India, such that women’s unpaid labor of social reproduction has increased, particularly for women from marginalized castes. Thus, patterns of participation in NREGA cannot be understood without understanding the specifics of the underlying crisis of social reproduction for labor. Social protection programs that do not consider the labor of social reproduction and are unaccompanied by broader socialization of such labor then likely fall short of mitigating deep-rooted inequalities. JEL Classification: B54, J21, J88