Month: March 2026

For over twenty years, India’s national rural jobs program provided a legal right to work for over 265 million people–the majority of them women–serving as a vital lifeline against poverty and a global model for social security. Tragically, however, that lifeline is now being cut.

In this episode, we speak with Khush Vachhrajani, writer and national coordinator at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research in India, about his recent article in The Wire, “How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More than it Hides.” Vachhrajani contextualizes the sudden 2026 demise of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and its replacement by the new Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (VB-G RAM G). As he explains, this shift effectively “kills the golden goose” for millions of rural workers by replacing a demand-driven legal guarantee with arbitrary budget caps and centralized control. We discuss the neoliberal money politics behind this move: a calculated transition from a rights-based framework that empowered workers to a supply-led scheme that prioritizes fiscal austerity over human dignity.

Still, our dialog is not merely a post-mortem of a fallen policy. From the “Save MGNREGA” nationwide agitations to defiant resolutions passed in thousands of Gram Sabhas, the people of India are actively fighting to reclaim their right to work. This episode explores both the devastating effects of the repeal and the growing movement of workers, unions, and activists who refuse to let this Golden Goose go quietly, proving that the struggle for democratic accountability is far from over.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

William Saas

Khush Vachhrajani, welcome to Money on the Left.

Khush Vachhrajani

Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

William Saas

Could you start by just telling us a little bit about your background and what brought you to the kind of questions that you’re asking in your most recent research, which you’re producing through your position at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research, or SAFAR, and sharing on your Substack?

Khush Vachhrajani

Sure. So, I’m from India. I’m from this city called Ahmedabad, which is in the western state of Gujarat. That’s also where the Prime Minister comes from, so, I think it has gone on the maps because of that. But it’s also the state where Gandhi was born and a very long part of his life after coming back from South Africa, when he started his journey in India, began from the state that I come from. I studied in a school that was sort of built on the foundation of some of the principles that Gandhi himself sort of taught us as a society. I currently work with a collective called the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research.

We are a group who’s just interested in making democracy work on a day to day basis for the most marginalized. We don’t see democracy as just an election-to-election arrangement, but also in terms of a person’s right to be heard, a person’s right to grievance, a person’s right to participate in the smallest decision making that affects the person or the society as a whole.

The work also is sort of anchored in some of these democratic principles. Apart from that, I love to read. I have been a follower of many of the progressive ideas that you all have sort of built over a period of time on Money on the Left and also have learned immensely from the writing, and the guests who have come here which has also sort of shaped a very core part of my own politics around money, around looking at monetary design. I enjoy music. I enjoy sports, and I have a lovely dog who’s going to turn five years old this year, and her name is Estelle. And that’s it. That’s more or less about me.

Scott Ferguson

That’s great. Can you maybe talk a little bit about some of your experience? You also studied in the United States and worked in the United States for a little bit.

Khush Vachhrajani

I did, so I did my master’s in public affairs. In the US, I was at Brown University in 2019 and 20. So my education was over when the pandemic sort of kicked in. During my time in the US, I also spent three months working in Houston, in the Mayor’s Office of Complete Communities, which was an initiative largely to identify and then work towards supporting under-resourced and historically underrepresented communities in Houston. My task was to sort of look at the habitability question in one of those communities called Gulfton, where I learned a lot around some of the challenges that the United States also face in terms of the politics of, at times, immigration, challenges around creating a safer environment for many of the people who come to the United States with a lot of ambition or aspirations, and sometimes also out of desperation.

So, I had a great time working with the mayor’s office and also sort of learnt a great deal about what are some of the day-to-days of the immigrants who live in Houston and how a mayor could support them through that administration. So, yeah. Before that, I was also sort of engaged in working with governments and civil society in India.

My education built on my lived experiences in India and sharpened my imagination, I would say, as well as my ability to contribute to some of these things that sort of affect the lives of people.

Scott Ferguson

What occasions this conversation today is the publication of an article that you wrote titled “How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More Than It Hides,” and it was published in a publication called The Wire. It’s essentially criticizing and diagnosing the radical curtailment and maybe even demise of this public works program that’s been around for decades, since the 90s, I believe, in India.

It’s a terrible situation, but we found that your analysis and your framing of the argument to be really thorough and quite inspiring, despite the fact that it’s such a tragic situation, precisely because you frame these politics as a politics of not just money, but monetary design.

So I don’t know where you’d like to start. We could potentially start by talking about the nature of this program. Some people who listen to this show might be aware of this program, but, probably a lot aren’t. So maybe we can just start with, where did this program come from? Where did it arise? Maybe the happy part of the story before we get to its dismantling, very recently.

Khush Vachhrajani

Right. The more hopeful part, I would say. These state backed public employment programs have been around in different parts of India since the 80s and the 90s, largely framed around Social Security for rural workers in absence of decent agricultural work, but more so as a protection against famine or any sort of climate crisis which might affect the agricultural work itself.

So whenever there was absence of work due to these kinds of scenarios, the government would come in and they would focus on largely rural public works, which can be done through manual workers. Against that kind of work, they would provide them wages for sustenance. So these kinds of programs have been around in India since the 80s and 90s in some parts.

And the experiences of those programs became a backbone for a broader advocacy in India, especially after the 1990s, where India sort of liberalized, opened up its economy, adopted the neoliberal, market-based framework in the economy, which brought in a lot of resources, finances and money to a very, very small section of society in a sense.

But the precarity in rural areas amongst workers, especially manual workers, agricultural workers, construction workers, deepened over the entire decade. So in the late 90s and early 2000s, the experiences of these public works programs in other parts of India sort of became a central piece of argument that India needs a federal job guarantee kind of a framework.

It was also sort of demanded or was framed as a program, or a demand, as a state’s obligation to its people. It was articulated as people’s right to work within the constitutional framework. It was framed as a sort of politics of money that the people are deeply interested in and which sort of breaks away from the neoliberal framework that the state was pushing, in a sense.

So, in 2005, after the advocacy of about 7 to 8 years, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act came about. So MGNREGA is what it is called, in a shorter sense, or sometimes in India, we also call it NREGA. So, NREGA was sort of conceptualized with this vision that every single person who wants to work can get work under this program.

There will be wage parity amongst men and women. Again, it was a breakthrough at that time. The government sort of decided a particular floor at which people are to be paid and that the floor will be revised every year based on inflation. So it’s sort of created a progressive framework which was rooted in creating a public option for employment.

While it was demanded to be a program which is running throughout the year, the government sort of enacted this law where each household will get work for up to 100 days a year. So instead of every person, it was like one person per household for 100 days. And, in terms of its design, if there are four people in a household who are above 18 – the working age – let’s say, for example, then all four people would be a part of, what was called, a job card.

Amongst those 100 people, anybody could come out and work. So it was again like 100 days per household. That’s how the program was shaped. In addition to creating this public employment option, it also created, as I said, a wage floor which was equal for men and women.

It also sort of provided 10 rights to the workers themselves; to each and every one of them will have a job card, they can go and demand work at any time, they will get work within five kilometers of their radius, they will get certain facilities at the worksite, they will get paid within 15 days of completing work, they will have the power to audit the kind of work that is happening around them (etc.). It was a very, very progressive legislation which was fought for by people’s campaigns and struggles for almost a decade. So that was basically the foundation of how the law came about. When it was passed in the parliament in 2005, it was passed unanimously, across all party lines, across all different political ideologies.

It was passed with a very emphatic belief that this is creating a right to livelihood or at least a path for people to claim the right to livelihood, but also with sort of an understanding that within the new liberal economic framework, this is the least a country could do for its people, which is sort of a public option at a particular rate for just 100 days a year.

So that has always been there and that is also something that I address in my article that this has never really been a revolutionary program the way that we all want, but it was still fundamental as a cornerstone in people’s politics in India.

Scott Ferguson

Was it restricted to rural areas or did it also operate in urban areas?

Khush Vachhrajani

It was restricted to rural areas, which would be about almost 70% of India. So it’s still pretty universal in that sense. What emerged after all these years of NREGA being operationalized is also that, during Covid, there were several urban employment guarantee programs, which were designed and launched in urban areas as well by different state governments.

In 2023, my neighboring state, Rajasthan, enacted an urban employment guarantee law itself, which mandated 125 days of urban employment on very similar lines of NREGA . So that is also one of the contributions, which I don’t really talk about in the article that has come out, but this is definitely something that I’m writing in my next piece reflecting on these kinds of effects that NREGA has had in the political imagination of Indian society as well.

Scott Ferguson

What’s your sense of the kind of work that has gone on in the auspices of this program, that I would assume is pretty various? There’s not just one type of employment. Do you have a sense of the variety of work?

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. So another beautiful part of the design of the law, since it was fought for by a people’s movement and struggle which sort of informed the overall design, every local unit in India – that local unit in rural areas is called a Gram Panchayat, you can also sort of understand that it’s GP – every GP has to first think about all kinds of work that they can do under NREGA.

So it is not a top down design. It sort of stems from the most decentralized local unit, and each Gram Panchayat is supposed to create, what we call as basket of works, at least 2.5 times the demand that may exist in the local area. So they have to make sure that they are able to imagine and they’re able to create enough work in their area so that they are able to meet demands up to two and a half times, which is quite great. The works that we’ve seen in India has varied a lot also because of the kind of geographies that have been we have seen in the northeastern part of India, which is very, very remote, with very deep forests and hills where this program has been used to build pathways for people living in the valleys to come up on the main road and get connected to the public transportation system in the southern part of India or even in the western part of India where the droughts are very, very common. We’ve seen this program creating step wells in villages, which is sort of a local traditional mechanism of storing rainwater. In the northern part of India, there are mountains in the Himalayas which are prone to landslides. We have seen this program creating a more ecologically sound infrastructure that is needed for the local community to not only commute, but also to sort of earn a livelihood.

Another aspect of the program has also been that different kinds of people can access the program. So if, let’s say, I’m a person with a disability, then the program design allows me to work either in my own backyard or in my house, and it will be counted under the NREGA. If I come from an historically marginalized community, which in India we call scheduled tribes and, the scheduled castes (Dalits).

So if I come from the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, I can work up to 200 days. Sorry, actually, 150 days in a year. If I am a person with disabilities, I can work up to 200 days a year. So all these progressive thoughts of who’s working, where they are working, and who is sort of making claims, is rooted in the design of the program.

There is enough documentation, a lot of writing, and several documentaries which have also been able to record the range of work that NREGA has been able to create. Even in the program design, they are all called assets. The NREGA has been building assets and not just work because these are all rural social infrastructure which is aiding the economic, political, social lives of people.

It’s been quite extraordinary in my experience, I have seen this operate in multiple geographies, multiple parts of India. I have also worked at a NREGA site during my experience in Rajasthan. These are all manual works. Imagine they are creating a small canal to make sure that the water flows smoothly between farms sometimes. In popular opinion writing, all these works are sort of termed as low skill works. Okay, but anybody who has worked in NREGA would be able to say  how highly skilled these works are. It’s not easy to both design and plan and then dig a stepwell. It’s not easy to build roads. 

Scott Ferguson

I don’t know how to do that.

Khush Vachhrajani

Exactly, exactly. Right. All these works are sort of termed as low skill, manual works, but I always term them as manual works which are building social, political, economic, architecture in many of these villages.

William Saas

So I don’t know if you’ve attended any meetings of the GP’s, or if they are documented in these documentaries, which I am absolutely excited to take a look at later, but do you have a sense for what those meetings are like? It strikes me that they’re probably more than just getting together and writing down a list of tasks to complete, but might end up being more expressive of community values and, as you say, social relations at the same time as they are about identifying work to do. Can you just provide any kind of overall broad or personal description of what goes on at these things?

00;21;59;12 – 00;22;26;18

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. These meetings, at the GP levels, are called Gram Sabha, which are basically convenings at the village level, in translation, and all the decisions which pertain to the GP or the village or the local unit are supposed to be taken only in Gram Sabha.

So it is like a general body of all the voting members of a GP. Right. From deciding what kind of work that needs to be done to the kind of money that will be needed to do this work, which, in the program, is called the Labor Budget. It is also developed in these Gram Sabha. To understand how these Gram Sabha work, and the picture that I’m going to sort of share is also how a Gram Sabha is really well organized, right, or is very well planned because like all other democratic functions, it is also a function of how active the voter is, how much power are they exercising as citizens of the Gram Sabha. There will always be vested interests. There will always be attempts toward the participation of people. But in some of these most thriving Gram Sabha that I have seen or many of us have seen, it takes place in layers.

First and foremost, there is a caste layer in India. India is a very deeply caste society, where the caste hierarchies govern many of these social relations, power struggles, control over resources and MGNREGA plans for these kinds of things. So if, let’s say, a well has to be built or a tree plantation has to be done to develop a garden, for example, which area would it take place in the village? Which are the communities that would benefit out of it? All these conversations are quite central to these discussions in Gram Sabha. So the first layer that these Gram Sabha try to facilitate, again these Gram Sabha, which are organized with an intent to make many of these things work, is to unpack what are the needs of different groups and communities within that village, wherever they are located and situated in terms of infrastructure.

The second layer that it unpacks is the layer of gender. I have said in my article that more than 50% of these workers are women workers. They are the ones who are in the villages. They are raising kids. They’re taking care of elderly parents. They are taking care of the farmlands. They are the ones who have not really migrated out of the villages to urban areas for work. So, the gender layers are very important in these kinds of conversations and the kind of infrastructure that women might need. Most of the time, the way Indian villages are organized is the responsibility of fetching water.

If I do not have access to piped drinking water or water for domestic chores, it falls on women. So where a well will be built or where the location or the site of a step well or even a canal depends on how women participate in these Gram Sabha. And then the third very, very critical layer comes as to what are the social needs of a community?

Does a school need, let’s say, a toilet or a playground or, does a hospital require a boundary wall sometimes, or a library requires a bit of renovation or a person wants to build, let’s say, a cowshed, or a small poultry kind of a mechanism to earn a livelihood. So these are the conversations that also take place in Gram Sabha and based on all these engagements the basket of work is developed. Based on the basket of work, then the Legal Budget is prepared. How much money will be required in the form of wages to execute the work? What will be the material cost?

How much of this material would we need to build all the assets under the NREGA for that year. So that is how these Gram Sabha sort of function and, again, we have also seen these Gram Sabha as places for deep contestation amongst the community sometimes. 

So in India, the person who’s elected and who’s the chair of the Gram Sabha is called Sarpanch, who is like the elected mayor of the GP. Mayor equivalent for a rural area. So it will also depend on the community where the Sarpanch comes from or if the Sarpanch is a woman or a man, if the Sarpanch is from the Dalit or the scheduled caste community, or if a Sarpanch is a graduate. All these things will sort of factor in how that Gram Sabha is being governed.

Then, in many areas where we have seen really transformational work happening or these really productive assets for people are being developed, there is also a role that the state has played in facilitating it. We have seen some really progressive bureaucrats, progressive governments, state governments especially facilitate these conversations in terms of providing more support to the village in bureaucratic functionaries, or on the role that they can play in facilitating this dialog between the elected members of the government and the general body, what are the kind of insights that they can provide, in terms of what might benefit the village in the long run vis a vis short term? So all these sort of permutations and combinations go into creating the basket of works which are then required for the Panchayats to submit under the NREGA program.

Scott Ferguson

So, we wouldn’t want to overly romanticize this program, because as you said, it’s, you know, in the context of a neoliberal era, it’s sort of the least that can be done. Yes. At the same time, I think it’s worth drawing out some of the radical potential here. I mean, I feel like you’re already talking about it, but I just kind of want to bring more meta language to it.

So we’ve got the context and the geopolitical context is neoliberalization. I mean, there’s lots of ways of describing what neoliberalization even means in the first place, but certainly a market ordered society where non-democratic, private allocation, is supposed to be the best, the most efficient, etc., etc..

The market is supposed to perform certain kinds of mechanisms that are dada dada da, and so on. All these basic questions about “who we are as a people,” “how do we organize and cooperate,” “how do we organize our labor,” “what is the mode of production,” “are there multiple modes of production,” “how should we go about this in the first place,” are just off the table. That’s the power of the neoliberal paradigm as a kind of, you know, radicalized reboot of the liberal paradigm. It seems like the jobs program in India really deeply contests that paradigm and offers an alternative, beginning not just with the kind of the democratic impulses in these local GP organizations and meetings, but also the way that these basic questions are being reposed from the bottom up once again. I mean, not just bottom up in terms of democratic participation, but bottom up ontological, conceptually. I think, so often neoliberal market logic presumes that if there are needs, the market meets them. And if the market isn’t meeting the need, it’s not a real need.

Khush Vachhrajani

Exactly.

Scott Ferguson

This is not new to anybody who’s familiar with any of the writings about public works programs and job guarantees. It’s not news to anybody who follows Modern Monetary Theory. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth really underscoring the way that this program just poses the question of: who are we to one another? What do we owe one another? How are we going to participate? And what are the needs of our community that are not de facto reduced to a reified neoliberal market?  I still teach Karl Marx all the time, for as many issues I have with Marx’s work nowadays, one of the fundamental questions he’s posing and what his critique of the alienation of labor is all about is not just, “oh, I’ve made something and my product has been yanked away from me by the owners of production,” but the very democratic question of how do we organize our labor together as a community? How do we even do that in the first place? And what should we be doing together? It seems like, again, not romanticizing it, but as an impulse this program has potential to pose that question in a very deep way.

00;33;14;15 – 00;34;06;23

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. There was no better way of putting it than what you’ve already done, Scott, really. The program was in action for the last two decades and even a little bit before that, but in the last two decades, we have seen so many GPs, Panchayats, really understanding the democratic power that they have as a unit in the larger schemes of affair. Progressive, elected leaders of these Panchayats would make sure that their claim to democratic money is heightened and it is sort of demanded for. Even from civil society and progressive groups, they have sort of latched onto this program to unionize some of these workers who have been working under NREGA and not just workers, but also, there is a concept of a “mate”, the mate is basically a friend who’s just supposed to sort of supervise a work site so we can also call them a work site supervisor.

So there have been civil society groups and unions to sort of unionize these workers and the mate to demand for full implementation of the program in the community, to demand expansion of the basket of works in the community, to sort of innovate at times as to the kind of infrastructure and assets that can be built, and their relationship with the village itself. Many of these really macro imaginations and philosophies come together in a program like this in a very real sense. One thing that I also mentioned in my writing is how it shapes the relationship between a landlord or a contractor and the workers themselves. In absence of a program like this, my power to negotiate wages is very, very limited.

And in the Indian context, it has been documented quite well that before this program was introduced in the villages, irrespective of how good or bad it was being implemented in the village, the fact that this design existed automatically pushed rural wages a lot. It really shifted the conversation from working at almost slave wages to working at dignified wages.

If, let’s say, the rural wage is set at 100 for now, the shift that we saw in the earlier years was not a 101 or 105. It was huge. It was 150, 200 at times. So it shifted, and in the one, it also sort of set what workers were actually losing by this program not being in existence.

We have seen that throughout two decades, even in Panchayats, where this program has not really worked because of many reasons. With the government in power that we have today in India, the last 5 to 6 years have been really, really difficult. Actually, the last whole decade has been really difficult for this program. There have been budget cuts. There has been public mockery by the Prime Minister inside the parliament about this program, despite all the structural challenges, the loss of wages has not come down. The faith that people have on the ground about the potential that this program could have in their lives and in their environment has not really gone anywhere.

Yes, there has been disappointment that the program has not been implemented, but we saw it in Covid that when state governments really pushed from their sides to implement these programs, people were coming out demanding for work. People were coming out to think about the kind of infrastructure that they need during pandemic and after.

What you also articulated so well, and this is something that I’ve tried to even sort of hint at in my article and I’m not really sure if I have been successful at it, but political imagination of a common person, and most times, a woman living in a village in India, really changed, as to what is possible in their lives.

The women workers, even today, are coming together protesting against repeal of NREGA from all different parts of India. Not because they were very happy with this framework and they were all hunky-dory. But it is the faith in the design that this is their democratic right, this is their claim to democratic money, and it is their faith that if one day I have an equal power to operate in this economy, which otherwise is extremely unfair to me.

That, I feel, has been the crux of the last two decades of NREGA. With all its ebbs and flows, the people, every time when they were offered an imagination of a progressive, public, employment program or a job guarantee kind of a program, people latched on to it and they really made sure that it works, wherever it works.

00;39;48;07 – 00;40;32;01

William Saas

Just want to give us a pass for a bit of romanticization. I want to underscore and emphasize a bit more. The NREGA seems like a program out of time in a couple of ways. One is that it’s under appeal now, that’s the obvious one. But “out of time” in terms of the two decades, as you just described, are periods noted for their intensification of neoliberal logics rather than their lessening. As I’m hearing you narrate and reading your work, it becomes, I think, obvious why and from what trajectories this program would be challenged and undermined, but that it has taken so long to get there is remarkable and I think a testament to the people who make up the NREGA projects, that do the baskets of work. Before we get to the repeal, I feel like we’re almost there, but living in the romance just a little bit longer. Was there any kind of more cultural work, artistic work commissioned or called for in these meetings and identified in the baskets of work? So, public art, public music?

Khush Vachhrajani

Fantastic question and not really, but I’m very glad that this has come up. And a colleague of mine who might listen to this podcast would be really happy to listen to this question as he comes from a community… 

William Saas

What’s his name, let’s shout him out.

00;41;28;24 – 00;42;02;03

Khush Vachhrajani

Oh, yeah. His name is Paras, Paras Banjara. He comes from the community that traditionally has been the nomadic tribes in India. His whole identity is also of a cultural activist among many of the other hats that he wears. But, unfortunately, in this regard, the ambit of works are limited to manual works and not really art cultural in that sense.

But in 2022, if I am getting the year right, I think it was around 2022 or 2023 again, in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic in India, which was disastrous for many communities economically, and the communities were already recovering from a demonetization experience in 2016 that really terribly implemented tax reforms in 2017, which was then followed by a pandemic. So there was this long period of real economic distress. So Paras, along with some of the other friends in, again, the state of Rajasthan, who are all sort of cultural activists and who look at culture as commons, work with local traditional artisans who specialize in folk music and different folk instruments.

They advocated for a very similar public employment program, 100 days for Rural Artisans in Rajasthan. It was centered around folk musicians, and the design was again very, very similar, where it would provide a 100 day wage employment to all these rural artisans, wherever they are. The basket of works were kept very, very wide, but it ranged from teaching in a school to performing a government function or to sort of participate in these Gram Sabha as cultural artists and entertaining people and talking to people about their art forms. It was quite a broad ambit. Implementation of that program was very, very haphazard. But the imagination was there, and it was something that has been fought for by Paras and some of these groups for a very long time. These are all traditional art forms and, really very, very strong and almost culturally extinct practices of folk music that stem from years and years – and in my understanding – centuries of traveling around the world as gypsies or as nomadic tribes from which they’ve picked up all these different art forms and music, and they’ve sort of made it more Indian. In one of the conversations on culture as commons, we saw many of these come together to perform a very different version of a bagpipe, a very different version of drums, a very different version of a string based instrument in that sense.

So that imagination has been tried. Not very successful, but the state did try to push for something like that. I remember, I think, in the US there was something just after the Second World War, tried in Washington state, if I’m not wrong, a public arts program. I think it was one of those states in the US. So it just tried.

Scott Ferguson

So I have a question, which I guess, in my mind, both comes from a place of ignorance and insight. So I want to ask about the so-called informal economy in India, which I know nothing about. All I know is that people tell me that it’s a large informal economy and by this I take to mean that it is not being directly organized by the rupee.

My ignorance is, I just don’t know how this works because I don’t study it. I don’t live there. The maybe slightly more insightful part of this is the Money on the Left presumption in our analysis is that there’s no ultimate outside or absolute inside and outside between a formal monetary economy and what might lie beyond that. In fact, what we call informal economies themselves have their own forms of language and accounting and responsibility and capacitations.

We, at Money on the Left, tend to try to blur the distinction between the so-called formal and the so-called informal. But I’m wondering if A) is anything I’m saying just off, and B) especially since the program was not year round or if it worked year round, but for only 100 days, so it wasn’t full time, right? I guess that’s what I’m looking for. It, of course, must have interacted in complex ways with the so-called informal economy. Do you have any sense of how this played out?

00;47;30;23 – 00;47;57;00

Khush Vachhrajani

A limited sense. I would try and sort of put out what I feel, and my understanding and I think the more general understanding in India about an informal economy also sort of stems from the fact that more than 90% of the Indian workforce is engaged in informal work. And what we mean by that is also that that work is not on any contract.

They don’t really have an employer of any kind. There is no fixed salary that is credited to their account by the end of the week or the month. There is no Social Security and it’s almost always a daily wage earning. So if I am a construction worker in a city, I would just go stand in, what we call a “Labour Chowk”, or, let’s say, a corner in a neighborhood where all these workers would come, let’s say, around seven in the morning, eight in the morning, and they would be picked up by a contractor to, let’s say, fix somebodies house for the day and that would be their job, and they would earn from the day. The second day would be something new, a new task, with a new contractor, a new place.

Scott Ferguson

But they’d be paid in rupees?

00;48;50;23 – 00;49;24;19

Khush Vachhrajani

Yes. They will be paid in rupees. Most of these people would earn in cash, physical cash. There have been several policy decisions which have tried to get many of these workers to be a part of the formal banking systems, largely through direct payments to their accounts. But still a lot of the Indian informal workforce earns in physical cash.

That’s also because that’s how they spend on a day to day basis, with the emergence of fintech and again, a very, very deep neoliberal financialization of banking itself, where they are charged every time they take out money from the ATM, there is no way that they can afford to lose any more than sort of what they’re getting, which is also really, really very low.

So these are the kind of people that we generally imagine as informal workers and in rural areas, where the NREGA was implemented. Actually it is still implemented till March 31st. The informal economy would be implemented in multiple ways. There is, one, direct agricultural labor. So I could be a farmer but with a very, very small landholding.

So it would not be enough for me to sustain. So along with working on my own farm, I would also be working in somebody else’s farm on an hourly basis or task basis or a day to day basis and I would sort of get money based on that. Or I would be a landless farmer and I’m working as a laborer, either as a contractual laborer with a farmer and then I would be employed for the entire season. Sometimes it is also out of precarity of different kinds where I could be a landholding farmer sustaining myself, but, for any reason, my crop got destroyed or there was a drought and I have loans on me, so I’m not able to pay off those debts. So, I am forced to work as a local. A lot of rural work is also construction. So again, it’s like what I describe for a city, it is  very similar to what would also exist in a rural area, where I could go to a worksite in the morning, and I could work from morning to evening doing manual work, and I would be paid for that.

These are the kinds of ways in which the informal economy is sort of organized in villages. What NREGA did was just push how the engagement with the contractor would be. That contractor could be a person who is working in the worksite, or the contractor could be a farmer themselves or the landlord at times, in just helping them negotiate at what price the manual work would be offered.

Scott Ferguson

So let’s talk about the devastation of this program. I mean, I’m assuming there were reactionary forces who wanted to end it the whole time. I’m assuming that it gained traction, but how did this all play out?

00;52;22;10 – 00;52;48;28

Khush Vachhrajani

Yeah, the trauma, the trauma. So, as I said, when the current BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government came in power in 2014, the prime minister, in his very first speech in the parliament, made a huge public mockery of NREGA by saying it’s a program where there is no pothole, so people first would dig that pothole and then they would fill that pothole. It’s that kind of a program that has been running and, he also said that he would make sure that this program sort of survives long enough for people to remember how big a joke this has been in the Indian economy. That was sort of a proclamation of where the public policy would be geared towards, in one sense. The program, however, was not killed directly through a new law, like what we’ve seen now, but it was sort of dismantled structurally through three means from 2014 to 2025, when they got a new law in itself. It’s also quite interesting because to many of us, who have been looking at how the repeal came about, it caught us by surprise along with the swiftness with which it was done. And, even the parliamentary procedures around this new law was quite something for us to see. But, our analysis and understanding has been that over the last 11 years, the program has been dismantled slowly to a level where people, many of these Panchayats, have not really seen works opening for three or four seasons now.

So for them, the program has always been dead. So this new program coming in makes very little impact on NREGA. But coming back to how I think it was dismantled over the first 11 years were three ways. 1) A very, very big focus on introducing very modern digital technology infrastructure in a reality where there is no phone connection or there is no internet connection. They introduce things like, digital identity based payments. India has one of the largest biometric programs called Aadhaar. They made sure that every single worker’s bank account is linked to this digital ID card, which is called Aadhaar. It is just a biometric identity program, nothing else.

It was proclaimed as that. So each and every person is sort of tagged to this unique ID, and then the money would be transferred directly to their bank account instead of it first coming to the Panchayat, or the GP and then through the GP, then getting it in the form of cash. And it was sort of introduced as a means to curb corruption, reduce inefficiencies and to make the whole payment mechanism very transparent.

Again, there is an Indian reality that has been narrated ever since the Aadhaar was launched in 2008, there would be difficulties in matching names of people on one document to another document. There will be typing errors. There is not enough infrastructure on-ground to make sure that these things are rectified. Then it is forced, from top down, in a manner where if there is any error, my money would be stopped, then it’s a catastrophe. That is what happened. So when they introduced this, we call it ABPS, which is the Aadhaar Based Payment System, it led to many bank accounts where the money sort of never reached the worker because there was a problem with the name.

There was a name mismatch or there was a mismatch in the biometric. As I said, it’s a biometric program. So they have to go and make sure that they verify at the branch location in rural areas that they are the same people and any reasons that the biometric has failed. So that is another reason why, despite working, they would not get their money.

And thirdly, it also sort of created an architecture where we’ve seen cases where, like, I think in 2022 or 23, close to 60 to 70 million people were just not paid because of these kinds of inefficiencies. So this was one of the first things which was introduced. The second thing which was introduced then was a biometric based attendance system at worksites where every worker before beginning their work on a particular day would have to go in and make sure that they are at a geotagged worksite.

They would have to do the fingerprints and make sure they match what we called a “muster roll”, which is just like a list of all people who are going to work at the worksite. So basically this was a digital attendance mechanism date. The geolocation of the work site and the geolocation of that worker has to match to make sure that the worker is not sitting at the houses and getting paid for not doing the work.

All this sounds fantastic, but it is just not practical. There will be issues with geotagging and that is what we realized. The person who is doing the geotagging has, let’s say, geotagged the wrong work site. Workers have come to the right work site because they know in that area in the village where the work site is, and it would just not match. Or everything is okay, the work site is matched, it is geotagged correctly, the workers are at the correct site, but there is no internet, so they have to move 500m up and down. Then the moment they move, the work site goes beyond the geotag range. So, people would come to work, but they would not be able to start their work because the attendance is not marked.

So there are so many people who came to work, but they were just not able to work. And that also creates a huge disappointment and a disincentive for workers to make their way all the way to the work site.

Scott Ferguson

Real quick. A meta comment on what you’re saying here. In the States, we call this “death by a thousand cuts,” right? It was eroded from the inside before the big blow knocked it out. The main point I wanted to make here is that, it’s not just that the development and implementation and ongoing evolution of the program was a question of contestation over monetary design in both narrow and capacious senses of that term, but the counter forces, the reactionary forces, the contestation against the program was also a function of monetary design in multiple senses.

01;00;49;28 – 01;01;22;09

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. You have got it absolutely right, that it is a death by a thousand cuts. This is something that we also have spoken about and written about quite a lot. One of the most insidious ways in which the program was killed was also around the democratization of money where the union government stopped paying state governments their dues.

The way this program is organized is that all the wage payments, 100% of the wage payments, come from the union government, who is the monetary sovereign government. And for all the material costs which are involved in any public work, 75% come from the union government, 25% comes from the state government. That has been a design that has been agreed upon which has been ruling since 2005.

But over the last seven, eight, nine years, we’ve continuously seen wages being withheld. So imagine workers are working on the ground and they’re just not being paid and the pressure is being felt by the state government and the state government doesn’t have the kind of money that is required to pay these wages. So if the wages are withheld, workers are not going to come to work. At the same point in time there is a provision for what is called a social audit in NREGA, which is basically going beyond the financial audit, but giving power to the Gram Sabha – the fundamental unit that is responsible for running this program – to also monitor how the program is being implemented, considering all these different parameters around how people are working with these worksites, how their experiences have been. Now, social audit has been a mechanism which has been fought for by people’s campaigns and struggles to ensure that people have a right to monitor the implementation of this program.

It is not left to a third party or the government to dictate how the program is to be functioning. The way it has been designed is, 0.5% of NREGA’s annual expenditure is earmarked for social audits. So the money has also been kept aside in the monetary design of this program. Then, in order to facilitate the social audit, each state has to create these social audit units, which are supposed to be independent autonomous bodies and that 0.5% of state’s total expenditure would come to them. Then they would make sure that they go to a  Gram Sabha, they prepare a team from the  Gram Sabha to then audit what has been happening.

So this has been an inbuilt mechanism for transparency and accountability within NREGA, which has been weaponized against different state governments where they have been told that “we are not going to release money to you because social audit reports have been terrible,” without understanding that when a social audit report is bad or whether it is sort of unearthing corruption, unearthing misuse of money, the department that is supposed to act on those findings and fix those gaps is supposed to be the rural development department.

It is not supposed to be these social audit units whose job it is to figure out what is happening, no. So even their money will be withheld, so the social audit units are left to dry and the states are also not getting money. This is something that we have documented systematically through our work as well, that there have been social audit units who have not received their dues for five, six years.

There have been state governments who have not received the wages of the workers who have worked in the state governments for several years. There have been court battles. The state of West Bengal went to the High Court of the state. They won. They went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said that the government has to release the money.

But what I mean to say is, and this is something that also sometimes troubles me, that our understanding of what a monetarily sovereign government can do, this is actually a flip side of that. They’ve decided to not really provide that democratic money to the money users in their federal mechanisms. The state government was to compensate these autonomous independent units, they were supposed to be the checkers in the system in that sense.

All these things have been used systematically to kill the program when all these digital interventions that I spoke about earlier were also introduced under the name or under the guise of transparency and accountability. It was to say workers are not working at the worksite.

Hence we are sort of introducing this worksite monitoring mechanism. It is insane because there are more than 100 million workers across India who work at these worksites and India does not have the kind of technological sophistication, infrastructure, architecture to be able to facilitate any of these big tech interventions and these are also not just benign interventions thought to make the program work.

These are also data and a very strong market linked surveillance of testing certain hypotheses, like whether the biometric attendance system in general could work in a place like India with 100 million rural workers. They don’t want to introduce this system for rural workers. They want to introduce this for something else, but this is a proof of concept.

Can direct payments to bank accounts work and what are the kinds of complications? So how do we then design a structure for these high scale financial transactions which happen amongst the top 5% of Indian users today? India has something called UPI, Unified Payment Interface, which is this free and open source payments protocol for digital payments, which is sort of different from Venmo in that sense.

But this is also a kind of proof of concept for interventions like those which are deeply market linked, which are all financialization of finance. It’s been really terrible to see the kind of experimentations which have been done on these hundreds and millions of rural workers, whose daily earnings are peanuts even under a program like this.

What we heard last year was that they also want to do facial recognition technology through drones at these rural worksites. The amount of money that is being spent on these technological interventions vis-a-vis the amount of money that the simple rural or manual worker is earning, it is insane. It just doesn’t make sense in the traditional public policy cost benefit analysis framework.

It just doesn’t add up. Right? So whose interest it is serving, is something that I think has been fundamental to many of us. We’ve followed the evolution of these digital architectures that have been forced upon people where there is no Opt-Out option. If I demand that I want my wages in the form of physical cash, I just can’t.

It has to come to my bank account, right? This takes away the idea of a monetary design which is free, fair, and just, which is democratic in that sense. There is a little bit of a technicality to clarify.

So they’ve come up with this new law, which is called the VB GRAM G Law. It’s a very long, complicated, full form. So I’ll just cut it out and call it VB Gram G. So they, one, have legitimized all the digital technology architecture that they introduced to NREGA as part of law, which is crazy and which is scary and which is unacceptable by all means, because all these interventions, which they did earlier in the NREGA were just through circulars and guidelines, there was no legal legitimacy of any of these things. Now it has that. Second, it also has sort of passed the law but then not on-paper repealed NREGA.  There is confusion around whether both of these will coexist, not coexist and how it will sort of play out.

But in the new law, they’ll also sort of change the fiscal arrangement of the program. Instead of the Union government being responsible for 100% or wages, which is the majority of expenditure in the program, they’ve shifted that burden onto the states and they said that the entire expenditure will be borne by states and the Union government with the share of 60/40.

The state governments do not have that kind of money. There’s no way any of the state governments could actually shell out 40% of the expenditure. So it’s just impractical. There is no way this can be done. Another crucial aspect of the new law is that – earlier, as I said, the labor budgets or the budget for the program would emerge from bottom up through these discussions and deliberations in Gram Sabha and Gram Panchayat, which would feed into the state and then the Union government budget – now, they have said that the Union government arbitrarily determined based on “normative” parameters, how much the allocation for this program in the current state would be. What those normative parameters are, we don’t know. They’ve not really specified that.

Scott Ferguson

I just want to point out to the listeners that you put scare quotes around normative, when you said normative. You were not using it straightforwardly. 

01;12;26;01 – 01;13;01;02

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. And anybody who reads the law multiple times, it would become more and more evident that some of these arrangements in the new law are insidious designs of killing federalism and sort of completely turning the monetary design upside down, making it extremely top down. As to why they would not specify what that normative allocation would be, they said that any state government or any local government, whatever program schemes they’re running on their own, can be merged with this new VB GRAM G law. There will be no consultation, no dialog with the state government on what they are okay with, what they are not okay with in terms of the arrangement or the normative allocation itself. If a state government wants to opt out of the mechanism, they either have to enact a law that is in line with the VB GRAM G law or better, or they completely let go of the money under the program. So even that 60% shared they can let go. 

One more thing, NREGA was a universal mandate. It was implemented universally across all GP’s. Anybody could ask for work anytime in the day. In the new law that they proposed, they have said that the Union government would notify the states and the districts in the sub-units where the program would be implemented. No consultation, no check-in, nothing with nothing.

It’s just like they will determine where all it will be implemented, and it’s also that they can change that each year. So there is a switch-on, switch-off clause. So today they can notify, let’s say there are five areas in XYZ states without consulting the XYZ states and putting the burden of spending 40% of that amount. Then next year they could very well be, “okay, XYZ States are done, no I’m going to move to ABC states. XYZ states are done and they have no power to really sort of claim the right of democratic money in that sense. So the way they have structured the new law is they will notify the area, they will notify the works, the state governments will have to spend 40% – there is no opting out of that – and I, as a union government, can notify, let’s say, all villages of a particular state, let’s say it’s an opposition ruled state, but normatively allocate only ₹1 to that state and say that, “okay, 60% will come through me, which is like 60 cents that would come from me, 40 cents you spend.”

Any expense that is over and above the normative allocation, the state has to spend. So now for all those villages where the Union government has notified work, the state will end up spending and there is no way it is implemented. So it is also to kill some of the politically opponent states financially, which is detrimental for the Indian economy.

It is not a matter of political preferences, but also the fiscal structure in the federal structure of the state itself.

Scott Ferguson

Well, you’ve begun to answer a question I had, but I’d like to pose it explicitly and have you contemplate it, which is: what you’re making clear, is that the new law didn’t end the program. It just crippled it. It created such new designs and strictures that it’s just now designed to fail.

But the question is, why didn’t they just get rid of it? Why didn’t they just pass a law that said, this is over?

01;17;10;20 – 01;17;35;19

Khush Vachhrajani

Because the political stakes are very high, I would say. What I was also describing earlier, even in areas where it has not been functioning or it has not been doing very well, or the democratically making has not really been at par with many of the other high performing states. The sentiment and the significance of the program has always been there.

To take away that absolute final thread that people are hanging on to in a very deeply unequal neoliberal economic framework would be a bit too much. It would be something that would be politically unacceptable and that is my reading. I could be partially wrong in this, but the reason why I feel that this is one of the major reasons is because they’ve got this new law with full intention to repeal NREGA.

The intention is not to change its nature. The intention is to repeal it, but they also want to repeal it in a gradual manner. So in the Union Budget, which was announced a couple of weeks back, we had allocated a little money for the new law as well as they have allocated some money for NREGA. Our understanding is that the money that is mandated is also for some of the spending expenditure under NREGA, but they’ve not really passed legislation in the Parliament saying that NREGA is over now and from April 1st, this new law begins. April 1st is the start of the financial year, so we have April 1st till March 31st. They’ve not yet made that clear. So our understanding is that they’re going to go along with both these laws sort of simultaneously existing while keeping state governments in limbo, because the state governments have no idea what are the notified areas in their states.

They don’t know the normative allocation. They don’t know how much they are supposed to budget from their own limited resources. So they’re going to continue that for a little while. And maybe in 6 to 8 months, then completely phased out NREGA. They would then implement the VB GRAM G Act, which practically would destroy fiscal federalism in India because there is no state government that is anyway close to even implementing a program like that. The amount of financial burden that the state governments would have is just enormous. In our understanding of monetary operation and how sort of public money works, it’s just not possible that the state governments are able to deliver on anything like this even remotely.

William Saas

The critical part of the story that you’re articulating is the big tech intervention, as you put it.

And this might be one place where we can learn the kind of cutting edge of the neoliberal playbook. These biometric systems, do you know if they’re intellectual property of private firms that have been licensed by the Indian government? Or are these state run software that are monitoring these work sites and doing precisely the opposite of what they’re supposed to do on the tin, which is to make things more efficient. Of course, they’re breaking these work sites.

01;22;28;24 – 01;23;13;07

Khush Vachhrajani

I think it’s a mix of both.That is why the Indian state has really been an interesting case study. How they’ve created a market of monetizable data of almost each individual or each citizen of India.The way Big Tech is functioning at the moment in a program like NREGA is private corporations working with the the Union government in developing and designing these software, they’re housed within the ministry of IT or what we call as National Informatics Centers as well. NIC, whose task was the digitalization age of Indian society. So these softwares are sort of housed within the NIC and they are the intellectual property of the state. What we don’t know enough of is how some of the data that is being generated through these softwares and actually it is that, none of these things are working because if you’ve seen the kind of images which have been uploaded on these digital attendance monitoring systems where people would just click like a photo of a cow or they’ll click a picture of an empty drawer and they just upload it and the ministry and the NIC don’t have the capacity to go through these millions of photographs which have populated. Right? So in that way, it’s also garbage in and garbage out.

But I think what they are trying to do – and this is a little bit of a leap of faith assumption – is attempt to understand what are the complexities of a biometric system that big tech needs to be aware about. There’s something that is being tested and trained across such a large mass of population that would sort of give a lot of information just on the design of the kind of infrastructure that has been set up and it will also start creating new forms of data of individuals who otherwise were completely out of this whole market economy. They were not making digital payments. They were not part of a formal banking system.

They were not part of the whole cellular revolution in one sense. They were not using mobile data. So a lot of things have happened in the last ten years where because these workers had to access more and more digital banking, they are forced to get on smartphones, they’re forced to buy data packs.

Their presence in this neoliberal economic system has been heightened almost by force and design and many of these things are linked to Aadhaar, it would also start generating very unique information about a very large set of population whose footprints otherwise were invisible in an economic sense. You might have actually heard this, they’re all called DPI, digital public infrastructures which have been sort of pushed by the Gates and the Fords and the Rockefellers of the world, who are part of the digital governance reform initiatives. Our whole understanding of the way DPI has come about in India is that it is very, very closely linked to the state-market nexus.

In one sense, it has not emerged organically from people or democratically through participation. It has been coerced through exercises of demonetization, exercises of linking bank accounts to the Aadhaar, transferring rural wages or subsidies or scholarships, all the public money only through digital banking. Earlier, India also had a very thriving post office system so if they wanted to digitize it, they couldn’t just very easily digitize post offices. A post office exists in every single village. Banks don’t exist in every single village, but this systematically clears the post office mechanism to pave ways for these banks and financial intermediaries to have access to biometric information, payments information, and attendance information in some sense even though it is not really useful.

It’s a design which is really screening of human rights violations, but also techno feudalism in a very concrete manner, which is now legitimized through a law like this, there will be rural stack of works. I don’t understand what that means, but the conversation of stacks and DPIs has become mainstream through this new act that has been passed.

Many of these reflections are also coming from a place where we, as a part of SAFAR, teach a course at National Law School, Bangalore, on digital technology, society and governance. Many of our conversations sort of revolve around the India stack, which is a payment infrastructure, the application infrastructure, and the identity infrastructure, that has been sort of promoted as the most ingenious thing that the Indian Government has done in decades.

But it’s also only to monetize data and information of common people at a very, very large scale in India but also outside India.

Scott Ferguson

So as we turn to wrap up this conversation, I guess I’d like to hear a little bit about current resistance, if there is any. Clearly you are resisting and clearly your organization is resisting, but I’m kind of curious to hear what’s the nature of resistance to this new law and the undermining of this program?

01;29;45;28 – 01;30;17;12

Khush Vachhrajani

The resistance is definitely there in areas where workers are organized. There have been protests, there have been sit-ins, there have been petitions to bureaucrats or to elected members, there have been district level convenings of workers, there have been long marches of workers in different parts of India. So the resistance is there for sure.

A belief is, that while it may take a bit of time, because of the size and the scale of the country and the complexity of the country, the resistance will start showing up more tangibly when the Panchayats or the local rural unit goes into election or the local district goes into election.

That is one way. The second is also that there are many progressive groups, associations and networks who have started advocacy with progressive state governments on creating an employment guarantee framework that is backed by state governments. How practical would that be considering the fiscal challenges that the state government would face. The attempt is to also try and imagine, collectively, how it can be done as an alternative to what the government is offering and also to build public consciousness around the limitations of this new law that is coming about.

It’s also an attempt at public education. Just yesterday, 12th of February, there was a total strike across the country, not just on the issue of NREGA but also on several other anti-labor, anti-worker legislations that had been passed by the Union government. Close to 300 million workers had come out on the streets to resist and protest, segmented in different parts and not really sort of gathered at one place.

But again, the news is out there and these resistances are going to build up, that is what my understanding is, and I am a bit hopeful, a bit optimistic about the medium and longer future of a program like this in the short run. I think because the program was so systematically dismantled and a counter narrative by the ruling government has already started spreading on the ground that the new program is going to give them 125 days instead of 100 days, there will be a phase where we will see in the short run, for lack of a better word, inaction from people on the ground or resistance of very minor scale, but nothing really tangible in that sense. But our understanding, while working with several movement campaigns has been that the inequality, the precarity, the status of falling household incomes, the debt levels, these are all growing so fast and it is all so acute that a void of a program like NREGA will be felt in very, very tangible terms. It will also be felt in cities, we assume. Women who are staying behind in villages, taking care of farms and cattle and the elderly, the children, in absence of a program which will employ 50% of those women, they really have no choice with their dignified livelihood for they to start migrating to cities in search of employment that is paying them their daily wages. That is yet to be seen.

The macroeconomic impact of the repeal of NREGA will be felt for a very long time. It is again, another piece that I’m sort of building towards. The austerity politics of this government over the last 11 years has now led us to a stage where the debt levels are alarmingly high, incomes are falling and wages have stagnated for the longest period in the history of the last 30 years or even in the history of Indian independence in that sense. So I think it’s all a very terrifying sign for the Indian economy. With public employment and, in all honesty, all of us have been even writing to the government, talking to the government, telling them that, if the aim was to just 125 days of work, that could have been done even within the NREGA form, they could have just amended the law, added 25 days more because the long standing demand for the last ten years have been that if you do 365 days of NREGA you increase the minimum floor wage from 200 to 500 rupees. All these conversations could have been taken into consideration. Looking at where the Indian economy stands today, it is very unfortunate to see that the government’s fiscal policies are very, very stagnant, I have written a couple of more articles actually that highlighted how the government in their public communication, has been constantly grappling with the fact that the industry or the market is not investing enough in the economy.

My whole point is, yes, because the sales are not happening. There is no demand. When there is no demand in a capitalist economy, nobody’s going to invest. There’ll be unemployment, there’ll be stagnation of wages and no matter what tinkering that they do through the monetary policy, it’s not going to work. It has to be done through a very, very strong fiscal policy, through fiscal stimulus, by putting money in people’s pockets, through wages to incomes, through pensions, through scholarships, so that they’re able to then save and spend in the economy.

But it seems that this is a very alien concept to the government in power, which has been taken over by the neoliberal economic thinkers who are caring more about the stock market than the lives and livelihoods of people.

William Saas

So no consumer demand, but a surplus of pictures of cows at work sites or around work sites.

Khush Vachhrajani

Yes.

William Saas

Useless garbage-in, garbage-out, data collected.

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. And just between us, here’s a funny, funny anecdote. We had somebody come into our classroom for the course I mentioned in my earlier response. That person said that the total number of people who are employed in the federal department that oversees these technological interventions and whatever that is coming to them, is a grand total of two.

So it’s a grand total of two people in a ministry looking at the design, the development, the deployment, and what is coming out of these so-called technological master strokes. We know what the future holds. It’s unverifiable information, but I would not be surprised if it is true.

William Saas

Yeah, I can imagine a kind of absurd comedy-like novel written about those two bureaucrats in charge of the 100 million person program.

So your Substack, it’s called “The Lighthouse,” but it’s, also you can find it by going to moneypolitics.substack.com. Money politics, obviously, is a phrase that we’re very invested in and familiar with, and we’ve talked about your article “How to Kill a Golden Goose,” which engages particularly with the work of Jakob Feinig, and moral economists of money and monetary silencing.

Just a last question. On our way out the door, we, at Money on the Left, have been interested in and talking about complementary currencies in the development of alternative payment schemes. I’m ignorant also of the history of complementary currencies in India generally. But do you have any sense of any movement in that direction as a way of sort of filling the holes and addressing the gaps that are being created by the government?

Khush Vachhrajani

Not really. That is something that I’ve been thinking about as well. So I am not really aware of any such efforts. I would love to know more if there are people who are working on things like that. It’s also something that I think about in the times when fiscal federalism is under attack.

What is it that the state governments could do differently to sort of survive and sustain in such a hostile environment from a very dominant political force that is there to last? It’s something that even I need to learn more about. Again, Money on the Left has been something which has really shaped my thinking and it has really pushed my own imagination in the sense of being able to think about ideas like this. I look forward to reading more about works that are happening around unique currencies in the US and some of these other experiments which are happening in Europe, which has come up in both Superstructure and the podcast.

So, yeah, I keep my eyes open for things like these and I’m really, really curious to learn more as to what India can do or Indian states and society can do in terms of alternative currencies and just imagination of monetary design in general.

William Saas

Well, Khush Vachhrajani, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. We’re very, very glad to have had you on Money on the Left. Thank you.

Khush Vachhrajani

Thank you so much.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript.