Rural Employment Generation In India Through Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is the boldest and most pragmatic approach of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government to the rural unemployment in India. In fact, this ambitious scheme has been designed as per the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) - 2005 (later renamed as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). The scheme was introduced primarily to provide one hundred days of guaranteed wage employment to every rural household in a financial year.  Over the last seven years, the scheme could provide employment to 305314218 rural households and generated 141348.4 lakh mandays of employment. As such, based on official data, this paper attempts to examine the performances of MGNREGS in generation of rural employment in India by concentrating some important feeder points such as employment generation, financial performance, Job Cards issued and average mandays of employment. After verification of data, it was found that the physical performances of the scheme in generation of average mandays of employment during 2006-07 to 2012-13 was only 46.30 days per household per year which was much below the minimum of 100 days. Besides, the scheme was able to provide employment only to 46.62 per cent of the total Job Card holders which means more than half of the Job Card holders were deprived of employment. To sum up, the performances of MGNREGS in generation of rural employment in India is not at all satisfactory.  The study incorporates a few meaningful suggestions to improve the performances of MGNREGS in generation of rural employment in India.