Summary The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is India’s (and the world’s) largest employment scheme. While many analyses exist on the impact and implementation faults of this program, scant attention has been dedicated to how political dynamics have influenced implementation. This paper will try to fill this gap with evidence from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. It will argue that the implementation performance of the scheme has been fairly good, despite the abysmal performance of the state government with previous employment schemes; the key factor in determining such a shift was the political commitment of the state’s chief minister.