'Breaking the backbone of farmers': contestations in a rural employment guarantee scheme

This paper examines narratives about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) to reveal people's interpretations of changes to agrarian relations in Andhra Pradesh. Through narratives, we are able to reveal more than just the material relations of production, unveiling internalised modes of control, how these have come under threat in recent times, and discursive strategies to restore them - albeit in modified form. It argues that the MGNREGA has become a site of ideological contestation, in which the scheme means either an entitlement to government support, or alternatively a threat to existing modes of control that can only be reinstated through the scheme itself.