On February 28, 2015, speaking in parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi famously dismissed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) as a “living monument” to the failures of previous governments. He said it condemned millions of impoverished people to survive by “digging ditches”.With his trademark caustic sarcasm, Modi had declared, “My political sense tells me never to scrap MGNREGA… Because we want the people to know who has left these ruins… who forced you to dig these pits even after so many years.”For nearly a decade after this, the programme did continue, although often limping, under-budgeted and struggling for breath, with wage payments delayed by months, even years. The Union government never acknowledged that the job guarantee was the soul of the legislation. It was not a government programme that could be withdrawn or denied budgets at the will of the executive. It was mandated by the law.Also read: ‘Historic Error’: Leading International Experts Write to Modi Government Against MGNREGA RepealStill, until now, the prime minister remained true to his assurance in 2015 to parliament: the programme and the statute that governed it were choked, but not discontinued.The prime minister would be loath to admit it, but it was a combination of MGNREGA and the National Food Security Act, 2013 that saved millions from slipping into near-famine conditions during the punishing COVID-19 lockdown. He would also not admit that governments and working people around the world applauded this unique law.Workers employed under MGNREGA on the outskirts of Ajmer, Rajasthan working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo: PTIRecognising the right to work during the pandemic, countries of the Global North had paid unemployment doles to those unable to find work. India alone showed an entirely different path for guaranteeing the right to work. This was by assuring not a dole but employment for the unemployed. In this way, India illuminated, through the MGNREGA, avenues to shield the unemployed from hunger, in ways that respected their human dignity.However, in ways characteristic of the Modi government, without any advance warning, without public consultations, after only a dismissive two-day discussion in Parliament, the MGNREGA statute was peremptorily terminated. The guarantee was axed. Instead, the programme would operate in areas chosen by the Union government.Also read: A Short History of MNREGA: 20 Years in Ten ChartsFrom the right to work, stemming from a fundamental constitutional right to life, the statute was diminished to uncertain largesse from the Union government. During the farming months, the programme would not operate at all, robbing farm workers of the bargaining power that they had enjoyed with their employers for the first time ever, only after the MGNREGA was launched. And the contribution of state governments to the new scheme was raised from 10% to 40%.Given the strained resource situation of most state governments, this would effectively near-annihilate the programme, especially in the poor states, such as Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, where the MGNREGA had served as a lifeline for India’s most dispossessed people.When Parliament dumped a law that was the result of the struggles of working people for more than a decade, my memories were kindled of the time that I had the rare experience of labouring on an MGNREGA worksite for one day. Those few hours had helped me understand more than reams of reading about – or supervising, as a district administrator – what the world’s largest social protection programme actually meant to the millions who toiled on its sites.I searched for my records of that experience, which I am sharing here.Friends in the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) have established a magnificent School for Democracy in the semi-desert plains bordering the Aravalli range in Rajsamand district of Rajasthan. To this school, I had taken with me a team of 60 Aman Biradari peace and justice workers and homeless rights workers for a week-long reflection on democracy.The semi-arid Aravalli region is in great need of minor irrigation and water-conservation efforts of the kind the author worked on for a day at a MGNREGA worksite. Photo: By arrangementThe MKSS comrades felt that spending a day actually toiling on an MGNREGA site would teach us more than days of classroom lectures. They were right.Uncertain about what to expect, we awkwardly emerged from our bus that spring morning, and we were quickly divided into work-gangs of five persons each. The “workmate” explained the task: digging earth to build an embankment for a small irrigation tank.Each gang was allotted a few square metres of land, from which they were to dig soil and transport it to the embankment wall. We were handed spades to dig and flat buckets to carry soil on our heads. The workmate also clarified the rules for measurement. We would work for four hours – a half day’s work – but would be paid a half-day wage only if we performed the minimum task-rate.The wages would be paid into the account of the regular MGNREGA workers, mostly women, who sat on surrounding mounds bemusedly watching us work.My gang comprised all formerly homeless men and women from Hyderabad, who had lived in our shelters and had now graduated into volunteers with other homeless people. Members of our gang divided the work among themselves. The young men would dig and, in deference to the fact that I was older, I was allotted the relatively less taxing task of carrying away the excavated soil on my head.Also read: Budget 2025: Improving MGNREGS Will Require More Than Just Increasing Work DaysThe first fifteen minutes were cheerful, with laughter and jibes being tossed between neighbouring gangs. But before long, the unaccustomed physical labour began to extract its toll. I had never before used my head to carry heavy weights, and it felt sore.The spring sun overhead was gentle, but still the sunlight began to scorch as we sweated. One young man digging the rocky earth in my gang suddenly fainted. We carried him to the shade, and the regular women workers helped revive him. He was shame-faced, but everyone good-naturedly encouraged him. One worker served water from earthen pitchers, and people gratefully gulped down large quantities, washing their perspiring faces.Four hours passed as though they would never end. When our prescribed half-day labour was concluded, all were relieved. We rested, and then wanted to know how much our work had earned. We in our gang found – after haggling over the measurement – that we had earned less than Rs 80 each.We were sobered and humbled by how hard it was to earn so little. But there was also a strange sense of pride, and of achievement and dignity. “How can anyone call this ‘unskilled work’?” wondered one younger colleague.It had required teamwork, planning and careful strategy to work on the embankment. Others spoke of the solidarity built by working in teams; how quickly we learnt to capitalise on our respective strengths as much as compensate for our weaknesses.Also read: Rollback of a Hard-Won Right: The Political Economy of Dismantling MGNREGAWe sat then for a while under the shade of spreading trees with the regular workers, many with their little children in tow. We explained to them who we were, the work we did with survivors of communal violence, hunger and homeless street people. We then asked them what they thought of the work they did on MGNREGA sites.Their evaluation was strikingly different from that of the prime minister. They did complain that wages were long delayed, that muster rolls were sometimes fudged, and that most panchayats didn’t ensure their full entitlement of 100 days of work.The workers the author met found MGNREGA work productive, dignified and useful to their localilties despite delayed payments and other problems. Photo: By arrangementBut none regarded the work to be futile. Instead, they spoke with pride of their collective contributions to slowly build the village infrastructure: the much-needed tanks, wells, schools and village roads; their work to improve their lands and conserve water; to find alternatives to farm work if that paid too little. How that had enabled them, for the first time in generations, to bargain with their high-caste landlords.They spoke of how MGNREGA work had brought money – for the first time – into the hands of landless women like themselves, which they saved and spent on food, schooling for their children and health emergencies. And, above all, how it offered them a dignified alternative to hunger, to build a better life for their children, to resist indebtedness and the hard and lonely distress migration to distant lands.I wondered then – and I do even more so now – that if every Member of Parliament could be required to work even for a few hours at an MGNREGA worksite then, maybe, the work would not seem like the pointless digging of ditches and a monument to public failure they accuse it of being. They would not be able to look at this work as just one more wasteful drain on public resources. Instead, maybe, they would recognise it to be, for our impoverished and resilient millions, a precious avenue for dignified survival, unique in all the world.Harsh Mander is a social worker and writer.