Mit'a () was mandatory service in the society of the Inca Empire. Its close relative, the regionally mandatory Minka is still in use in Quechua communities today and known as in Spanish.
Historians use the Hispanicized term mita to differentiate the system as it was modified and intensified by the Spanish colonial government, creating the encomienda system.
Mit'a was effectively a form of tribute to the Inca government in the form of labor, i.e. a corvée. Tax labor accounted for much of the Inca state tax revenue; beyond that, it was used for the construction of the road network, bridges, agricultural terraces, and fortifications in ancient Peru. Military service was also mandatory.
All citizens who could perform labor were required to do so for a set number of days out of a year (the basic meaning of the word mit'a is a regular turn or a season). The Inca Empire's wealth meant a family often needed only 65 days to farm; the rest of the year was devoted entirely to the mit'a. A relative of mit'a (federal work) is the modern Quechua system of Minka or , which is mostly applied in small-scale villages. The Minka was adopted during the 1960s on large-scale federal projects of Peru.
Religious worship
The Incas elaborated creatively on a preexisting system of not only the mit'a exchange of labor but also the exchange of the objects of religious veneration of the peoples whom they took into their empire. This exchange ensured proper compliance among conquered peoples. In this instance, wak'as and paqarinas became significant centers of shared worship and a point of unification of their ethnically and linguistically diverse empire, bringing unity and citizenship to often geographically disparate peoples. That eventually led to a system of pilgrimages throughout all of these various shrines by the indigenous people of the empire prior to the introduction of Catholicism.
Enormous construction of highways and structures were possible in part only by the use of the mit'a. All the people worked for the government for a certain period of time. This labor was free for the Inca Rule. During the Inca period, men were required to work 65 days in the field to provide food for his family. When someone's turn came, he joined the various works that used the mit'a. A communal type of elemental provisions and needs was set up in order to care for the families of those who were absent for mit'a. People worked in building highways, the construction of homes for the emperor and nobility, monuments, bridges, fields belonging to priests and the emperor, and mines.
System
All males starting at the age of fifteen were required to participate in the mit'a to do public services. This remained mandatory until the age of fifty. However, the Inca rule was flexible on the amount of time one could share on the mit'a turn. Overseers were responsible to make sure that a person after fulfilling his duty in the mit'a still had enough time to care for his own land and family.
The construction of bridges and oroyas was the responsibility of the local ethnic groups, who divided the work according to the mit'a system, with the population divided into hanan and urin or ichuq (ichoc) and allawqa (allauca) (upper and lower, left and right). During viceregal times, the Andean method of distributing labor obligations among the ethnic groups was preserved, which permitted the continued maintenance of these public works. The war mit'a took men from their ayllus to serve in the state armies. All labor in the Andean world was performed as a rotational service, whether for maintaining the tampus, roads, bridges or for guarding the storehouses or other such tasks. The craftspeople enjoyed a special status in the Inca state. Although they worked for the state, they did not take part in the agricultural or war mit'a. The agrarian mit'a was distinct from the fishing mit'a, and these labor groups never intervened in each other's occupations. In the señorio of Chincha, the fishermen numbered ten thousand, and went to sea in turns, the rest of the time enjoying themselves by dancing and drinking. The Spaniard criticized them as lazy drunkards because they did not go to sea daily and all at once. The mining mit'a was also fulfilled at the level of ayllus, of the local lord, and, in the last instance, of the state.