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........

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