Padma, a Chenchu woman with disabilities from Nagarkurnool district, remembers a time when life felt secure. Under the Chenchu Special Project of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), she and her deaf husband were each guaranteed 15 days of paid work every month. Wages were handed over in the village, and much of the work could be done in their own fields. The steady income meant food on the table, some savings for their young son’s future, and the confidence that there would be work even in lean months.
But in 2021, Telangana’s decision to scrap this project dismantled a vital lifeline for one of its poorest tribes, pushing families like Padma’s into debt and despair. As debates over shrinking MGNREGA budgets, the attendance app, and Aadhaar-based payments dominate national headlines, the Chenchu experience stands as a warning of how one policy change can erase years of progress.
Why the Chenchus needed a different model
For readers unfamiliar with it, MGNREGA is a national law that promises up to 100 days of paid manual work a year to any rural household whose adult members are willing to work. It is meant to act as a safety net: no one in rural India should go hungry for lack of work.
But for the Chenchus — a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) — the standard version of MGNREGA was almost impossible to access. They are a small Adivasi community, about 14,000 in Telangana, living in scattered hamlets on one side of the Krishna river, with their kin in Andhra Pradesh on the other. They inhabit remote forest and hill terrain, far from banks, markets, and government offices. Many depend on seasonal forest produce and agricultural daily wage labour, leaving them vulnerable to food shortages in lean months.
When the Chenchu Special Project was introduced in 2009, MGNREGA wages were still paid in cash through local arrangements, not through bank accounts. This made the model viable for the Chenchus, who lived far from any banking facility. But once MGNREGA gradually shifted to mandatory bank payments — and later when the Chenchu Special Project itself was scrapped — accessing wages became a major hurdle. Travelling to a bank could take an entire day’s time and earnings. On top of this were other barriers: discrimination at mixed worksites and the heavy manual tasks assigned under the general MGNREGA that were not always suited to their livelihoods.
What the special project changed
It was this reality that led the undivided Andhra Pradesh government to launch the Chenchu Special Project in 2009. The scheme guaranteed 15 days of work every month to each adult Chenchu — far more than the 100 days per household in the general scheme. Work norms were lighter to account for the hilly terrain and physical capacity. Wages were paid in cash, inside the village, by Chenchu women’s self-help groups, so no one had to spend time or money travelling to a bank. The scheme was run by the Integrated Tribal Development Agency (ITDA), whose staff knew the villages and could respond quickly to problems. Crucially, Chenchus could also use MGNREGA to work on their own fields, improving farm productivity and food security.
The results were dramatic. Take Gudi Banda village in Nagarkurnool district, once a model for how the special project could transform livelihoods. Almost every household took part, payments were on time, and fallow farmland was cultivated.
How it was dismantled
After Telangana’s formation in 2014, the former Sunnipenta ITDA for Chenchus remained in Andhra Pradesh, while Telangana created a new ITDA at Mannanur — without a Project Officer even after 10 years of statehood, leaving it a mere nameplate. The lack of a Project Officer also meant that Chenchus received less support in the distribution of seeds and other agricultural assistance, weakening a crucial supplementary lifeline alongside MGNREGA.
The special project continued under the ITDA until 2021, when Telangana’s MGNREGA system was moved from the state’s own MIS — which allowed special provisions for Chenchus — to the centrally run NIC (National Informatics Centre) platform. The old state system could handle customised rules: extra workdays, advance payments, lighter norms, and local cash disbursements. The NIC system had no room for this.
With the scrapping of the special project that year, control of MGNREGA shifted from the ITDA — whose staff had deep familiarity with tribal hamlets — to the Department of Rural Development, which had little understanding of Chenchu realities. An increasing reliance on technology, including the attendance app for worksite photos and Aadhaar-based payment systems, added barriers, especially given poor digital literacy, mobile coverage and weak banking access. The decision to end the special project was taken without consulting Chenchu Gram Sabhas, despite the Forest Rights Act granting these bodies a central role in decisions affecting forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribes’ livelihoods. The change also meant the state could no longer track Chenchu-specific MGNREGA participation — their employment and wage records disappeared into state averages, making their needs invisible in policy discussions.
The impact on Chenchu lives
The scrapping of the special project was not just an administrative change; it upended the daily lives of one of Telangana’s smallest and most vulnerable communities. For more than three years, villages like Padma’s saw no MGNREGA work at all. Farming suffered because families could no longer use the scheme to cultivate their own fields. In places like Gudi Banda, once a showcase for the programme’s success, local agricultural production dropped.
With no local employment, migration rose sharply, often into insecure and exploitative work like chilli harvesting, brickmaking, or wood-cutting — echoing broader patterns of distress migration across rural India. For a four-adult Chenchu family where all members worked under the special project, 15 days of guaranteed work per month at a base wage of Rs 300 per day meant around Rs 18,000 a month. Under the current general MGNREGA, average monthly earnings for such a family are barely Rs 2,500 — a drop of more than 85%.
Ramakrishna, a Chenchu leader from Padra mandal, Nagarkurnool district, who closely followed the MGNREGA, explained it bluntly: “After the project was scrapped, the NREGA income of Chenchus in our village came down by more than 75%.”
A constitutional blind spot
The Indian Constitution, under the Fifth Schedule, obligates the state to protect the economic and social interests of Scheduled Tribes. Scrapping the Chenchu Special Project without consultation or an alternative runs against that spirit. For Telangana — a state that came into being on promises of social justice and greater support for marginalised groups — dismantling a scheme that had demonstrably worked for one of its smallest tribal communities represents a deep contradiction.
Other states have chosen differently. Odisha guarantees 300 days of MGNREGA work in backward blocks where migration is high and adds over Rs 100 from the state budget to match the minimum wage. Telangana, by contrast, removed the only tailored support system that addressed the specific realities of the Chenchus. This shows that dismantling the Chenchu Special Project was not inevitable — it was a political choice.
For over a decade, the Chenchu Special Project proved that MGNREGA could be adapted to the realities of a vulnerable community and deliver real change. Letting it vanish — without debate, without explanation and without the consent of the people it served — has left villages like Padma’s poorer and more insecure than at any time in recent memory.
Restoring a Chenchu-specific employment scheme under MGNREGA — with local cash disbursements, lighter work norms, ITDA management, and full Gram Sabha consent — and increasing the guaranteed days of employment well beyond the general 100-day limit are not acts of charity. They are constitutional obligations. More importantly, the Chenchu experience shows why MGNREGA must remain flexible and tailored to the realities of PVTGs and other vulnerable communities across India, not just in Telangana.
Venkateswarlu Kuruva and Chakradhar Buddha are researchers with LibTech India, a collective housed at Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD). B Kranthi Kumar is a social activist. The views expressed are the authors’ own.