Mediation in India’s Policy Spaces

Abstract

Much has been written about India’s historic social policy, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), some celebrating but most criticising its implementation processes and outcomes as a pro-poor rights-based law. This chapter looks at the other end of the policy process — the making of this policy — in order to demystify both the mediators who were involved in the Act’s making and their actions that led to the Act being formulated in its present shape. In identifying the mediators, this chapter disaggregates ‘state’ and ‘society’ actors involved in the policy-making process and critically assesses their positionalities to posit that mediators sit within, outside as well as in between these two groups. In fact, as my analysis will show, mediation can be understood as a tenet of state-society interactions, through which the distinction between the state and society is reproduced.