Women Workers and their Status in Mgnreg Programme: A Study in Jharkhand

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act (MGNREGA) is a programme of rural development which aims at enhancing livelihood security of households in rural areas of the country by providing at least one hundred days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. In this programme a minimum of 33 percentage participation of women is envisaged. However, the participation has wide inter-State variation ranging between 94 in Kerala and 19 per cent in Uttar Pradesh during the financial year 2012-13. Participation percentage of Jharkhand is 32 which is 1 percentage below the minimum requirement. Under this backdrop the paper makes a critical enquiry of the status of women in MGNREGA in the State of Jharkhand. Based on the State level data on implementation of this scheme, this paper examines the status of women participation in MGNREGA in Jharkhand. The paper presents inter-district variation drawing on secondary source and forwards reasons for the same.