The Genesis of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan: From Struggle to Formation

The story of how ordinary villagers in Rajasthan took on feudal landlords and corrupt officials-and eventually reshaped India’s democracy-is one of the most remarkable chapters in modern grassroots activism. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), formally founded on May 1, 1990, wasn’t the work of a single dramatic moment. It was the culmination of years of small, often painful battles fought in the dusty villages of central Rajasthan. Understanding how MKSS came into being offers a masterclass in how persistent local struggle can transform into a movement that changes national law.

The setting: Rural Rajasthan in the late 1980s 🔗

To appreciate why MKSS was needed, we must first understand the conditions in which it was born. Rajasthan in the late 1980s was a state where feudal structures continued to shape everyday life, decades after independence. Drought-prone districts like Ajmer, Bhilwara, Pali, and Rajsamand depended heavily on famine relief works and government rural development schemes. For landless labourers and marginal farmers, these public works were often the only source of livelihood during the dry months.

But the system was rigged. Contractors, sarpanches, and local officials frequently colluded to pocket wages by creating fake muster rolls, inflating material bills, and paying workers far below the minimum wages mandated by the Minimum Wages Act, 1948. Workers had no way to verify what the records said, because those records were kept locked away in panchayat offices and sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) offices. Without access to information, there could be no accountability.

The three founders and their path to Devdungri 🔗

The seeds of MKSS were planted in 1987, when three individuals chose to settle in the small village of Devdungri in Rajsamand district. Each brought something distinct to the partnership.

Aruna Roy: The insider who walked out 🔗

Aruna Roy joined the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) in 1968 but resigned in 1975 to work with the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) in Tilonia, founded by Sanjit “Bunker” Roy. Her frustration with the limited scope for grassroots political action eventually led her to leave SWRC in 1983. Her years inside the bureaucracy gave her something invaluable: a deep understanding of how government systems were designed to function, and, more importantly, how and why they failed the poor.

Nikhil Dey: The student who came home 🔗

Nikhil Dey had been studying in the United States but gave up his academic career to join Aruna Roy in 1983. His strength lay in community mobilisation-translating dense policy jargon into language that rural workers could understand, debate, and act on.

Shankar Singh: The voice of rural Rajasthan 🔗

Shankar Singh was a local from Rajasthan who had been involved in politics and was deeply troubled by the poverty and inequality around him. His roots in the region gave the future organisation an authentic local character, ensuring it never became an outsider-led project. He would later become famous for pioneering the movement’s cultural communication-using puppetry, theatre, dance, and music to explain complex issues like corruption to ordinary villagers.

Together, these three moved to Devdungri with a clear set of self-imposed rules. As documented in early accounts of the movement, they refused foreign and government funding, rejected conventional NGO structures, and committed to living on no more than the minimum wage for unskilled labour. This ethical discipline would later lend the organisation enormous moral authority.

Their initial work was a field study for the Union Government’s Ministry of Rural Development, examining how the poor participated in poverty alleviation programmes. But fieldwork quickly pulled them into real struggles.

The Sohangarh struggle: A test case against feudal power 🔗

The first major battle came through a dismissed police constable named Lal Singh, who belonged to Sohangarh village. Lal Singh had already led a strike within the Rajasthan Police demanding that constables not be forced to do domestic chores for officers, for which he had been dismissed. When he met the Devdungri team, he invited them to his village to help confront a powerful jaagirdar (feudal landowner) named Hari Singh.

The nature of the exploitation 🔗

Hari Singh had illegally occupied common village land-according to some accounts, over 1,500 acres-and behaved as if he were the sovereign of the area. Villagers were fined if their cattle grazed on what he called “his” land or if they collected firewood from it. This was not just economic exploitation; it was the everyday humiliation of feudal dominance continuing well into modern India.

The public hearing at Tal Panchayat 🔗

The team’s intervention led to a pivotal moment: a public hearing convened by the Sub-Divisional Magistrate in the Panchayat of Tal. Aruna Roy and her colleagues challenged Hari Singh’s illegal occupation of a specific piece of 25 hectares of common land. What turned the tide was something seemingly mundane-the local patwari (land records officer) quietly provided them with the plot numbers and official documents needed to prove the case.

This is a detail worth pausing on. Without that official paperwork, the villagers’ claim, however true, would have been unprovable. With it, the SDM ruled in their favour, and the 25 hectares were returned to the community. The land was then handed over to the villagers, with the reclaimed portion eventually going to a women’s cooperative.

The Sohangarh victory delivered a lesson that would define the movement’s entire future: information is power. Control over records was control over justice itself. The realisation that government documents could be weapons in the hands of the poor-rather than tools of oppression in the hands of the powerful-was an intellectual turning point.

The Dadi Rapat incident: The final catalyst 🔗

If Sohangarh demonstrated what was possible, the struggle at Dadi Rapat made an organisation inevitable. Dadi Rapat was a site of the State Irrigation Department, where most of the workers came from Sohangarh village itself.

The anatomy of wage theft 🔗

When the Devdungri team investigated, they uncovered a textbook case of systemic wage fraud. The problems were layered: workers were given individual tasks but paid collectively, officials inserted bogus names into the wage lists, and actual payments fell well below the legally mandated minimum. Workers were cheated twice-once through faulty measurement and again through fictional entries that allowed officials to siphon off funds.

The engineer’s visit and its aftermath 🔗

In 1989, following MKSS’s intervention, an engineer visited Dadi Rapat, inspected the work, and confirmed that the workers had indeed met their targets. He ordered full payment of minimum wages. Yet even after this official direction, workers continued to receive less than they were owed. The bureaucracy simply ignored its own findings.

This was the moment of realisation. As described in the IGNOU teaching material on MKSS, workers understood that isolated petitions and individual complaints would never work. Corruption was not an occasional malfunction of the system-it was the system. Without a sustained, collective, organised struggle, minimum wages would remain a promise on paper.

May 1, 1990: The formal founding 🔗

The choice of date was deliberate. On 1 May 1990-International Labour Day-a public gathering of nearly 1,000 people drawn from 27 villages assembled in tents outside the town of Bhim in Rajsamand district. At this rally, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan was formally established. The name itself-“Workers’ and Peasants’ Power Collective”-announced its purpose.

An unusual organisational design 🔗

MKSS’s founders made a set of deliberate choices that set it apart from the typical NGO. It was structured as a non-party political organisation with no designated leader, no formal constitution, no membership fees, and no registration as a society or trade union. Funds would come only from volunteer contributions-never from foreign donors, never from the state.

This austerity was not performative. It was a direct response to what the founders had seen: many social organisations compromised their independence the moment they began receiving institutional money. By refusing such funding, MKSS could confront any government, of any party, without fear of losing support.

Early tactics and the first hunger strikes 🔗

Immediately after its formation, MKSS organised a hunger strike in front of the SDM’s office, which was called off only after the District Collector intervened. A similar strike in Barar for twelve workers escalated when police cracked down on protestors on the fifth day. The movement responded with another strike against police oppression-and won a significant victory when the Rural Development Secretary of the Government of India stopped central assistance to Rajasthan under the Jawahar Rozgar Yojna, citing violations of the Minimum Wages Act. The state government was forced to order payment of minimum wages to the workers.

Why the genesis matters 🔗

The formation story of MKSS is not mere historical detail. Each early struggle contributed a specific insight that would shape the organisation’s future work.

The Sohangarh case established that access to official records was the missing link between legal rights and actual justice. The Dadi Rapat experience proved that collective struggle was essential because the bureaucracy was indifferent to individual suffering. The early hunger strikes revealed that hunger strikes alone were insufficient-a more creative, systemic approach was needed. This realisation would eventually lead to the innovation of the Jan Sunwai (public hearing) in 1994, and later to the statewide and national movement for the Right to Information Act, which was finally enacted in 2005.

The founders’ discipline-refusing external funding, living on minimum wages, rejecting hierarchy-gave MKSS a moral weight that no amount of publicity could manufacture. When MKSS activists demanded transparency from others, no one could question their own integrity.

From local grievance to national transformation 🔗

What makes the genesis of MKSS especially instructive is how tightly it linked concrete material demands to larger democratic principles. The villagers of Sohangarh and Dadi Rapat were not asking for abstract reforms. They wanted their 25 hectares of land back. They wanted their daily wages paid in full. Yet the pursuit of these specific claims unearthed a deeper truth: Indian democracy could not function properly as long as citizens had no right to see the records of how public money was being spent in their name.

This insight would later be captured by Sushila, an early MKSS leader, in the slogan that became the movement’s philosophical core: Hamara paisa, hamara hisaab-our money, our accounts. It is a slogan that emerged not from theory but from the lived experience of the struggles at Sohangarh and Dadi Rapat.

What do you think? Do you believe that grassroots movements rooted in specific local grievances are better positioned to drive systemic reform than top-down policy initiatives? And in a country where feudal structures still persist in many pockets, what lessons from MKSS’s genesis remain most urgent for citizens today?

References

1. https://labour.gov.in/minimum-wages
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aruna-Roy
3. https://www.theweek.in/theweek/cover/2025/10/04/rti-movement-india-history-beawar-devdungari-village.html
4. https://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/programs/ai/rti/india/articles/The%20Movement%20for%20RTI%20in%20India.pdf
5. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/73717/1/Unit-10.pdf
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aruna_Roy
7. https://rti.gov.in/