Development of people’s rights in a representative democracy like India’s is a complex historical process. It could be distinguished between two kinds of rights (customary and legal rights). The former refers to rights based on customs and rituals and the later refers to rights sanctioned by the state. Usually such rights are enshrined in the constitution. The anti-colonial struggle and the post-independence India opened up streams of democratic consciousness and it spread new visions of social transformations, giving concrete socio-economic content to the agenda of freedom struggle. Creative society thus emerged as a theatre of intense struggle between forces of freedom and forces of domination. Here, the paper has discussed about legal rights (in the context of modern nation states) especially with reference to the right to work in India through a case study of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).