If you are lying, I will have all this checked on the computer

If you liked “Mr Bates vs the Post Office”, you must read “Last Among Equals: Power, Cast and Politics in Bihar”. One day Sanjay, an electrician in Delhi, returns home to his village in Bihar to visit his parents. He passes by some Dalit caste women talking about not getting paid for the NAREGA. What he does next is extraordinary.

India passed an Employment Guarantee Act in 2004 (“NAREGA”). Anyone is entitled to 100 days of minimum wage work. The act goes on to be critical for poverty reduction and a safety net during the demonetisation and then Covid crises. It has three amazing properties: (1) everyone gets this right (2) the poorest benefit as the work is so hard and wage so low that only they would claim and (3) everything is published on the internet. Every day worked, every worker’s name, every payment. Everything.

Sanjay is from a poor caste, only semi-literate in English, and is shy and quiet. He keeps on going into an internet cafe in Delhi to watch to try and figure out what people do there. He sees people click on the “blue circle” and then spend hours reading and watching. One day, as someone leaves the computer, Sanjay takes the seat and clicks the blue circle. The Google logo.

The types in “Bihar NAREGA”.

Why? He wanted his first sentence on the internet to be something meaningful, something important about his poor state and what those poor women were talking about.

Google shows him the government site. The government site shows him his village name. The village name shows him thousands of names. He asks the cafe owner to print them all.

Why? He didn’t understand what he was reading but had a guess it was important. And he had a feeling it might not be there in the future. The cafe owner said it was hundreds of pages of printing, ¾ of a daily wage. Sanjay paid to print.

The book follows his story as he goes back to show the people in his village these print outs. The poor women cannot believe the government knows their name. They also see the fraudulent payments in their name. The people pocketing their wages are now faced with an educated mob.

“Many women in the movement are illiterate, but their faith in the computer is supreme … I have seen them threaten officials of the government saying, if you are lying, I will have all this checked on the computer.” Workers “who can barely write their own names diligently take photographs and videos as proof of working on NREGA worksites. These come in handy when they are accused of shirking by government officials or when records are falsified and payments are denied.”

You can see Sanjay and the villagers in this video:

There is much more to this beautiful story and Mamidipudi Ramakrishna Sharan tells it so beautifully. The book is now only available in India https://www.amazon.in/Last-Among-Equals-Politics-Villages/dp/9390679664 with UK version for January 2026. But Scribd has a digital version and I cannot recommend it enough: https://www.scribd.com/document/845875203/last-among-equals-power-caste-politics-in-bihar .