Potential of MGNREGA in Empowering Rural Women: Some Preliminary Evidence Based on a Field Study in Ernakulam District in Kerala, India

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act aims at enhancing the livelihood security of people in rural areas by guaranteeing hundred days of wage-employment in a financial year to a rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Apart from the women empowerment point of view which is quite typical in Kerala, MGNREGA implementation has got tremendous potential for economic development of Kerala state, particularly through the socioeconomic upliftment of the rural poor. Besides, NREGS has the potential to give a new dimension to the work culture in the state. While the workers have been hitherto controlled by contractors and their middlemen who know how to extract work. With the NREGS implementation the out turn has been initially very poor as the workers could not be supervised properly. However, soon the workers have themselves realized that they would be losing collectively and a new internal dynamics evolved with peer pressure forcing workers to put in their maximum effort. Besides, a kind of social responsibility has also become evident as more capable workers have become more than willing to put in extra effort to make up for those who genuinely could not do hard work beyond a point, like the women and the elderly. In short, a new culture that promises far reaching benefits to the state in the future has begun to emerge.