NREGA

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is India's (and the world's) largest employment scheme. While many analysis exist on its impact and implementation faults, scant attention has been dedicated to how political dynamics influence its implementation. This paper will try to fill this gap with evidence from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. It will argue that the implementation performance of the scheme has been fairly good, despite the abysmal performance of the state government with previous employment schemes. The key factor in determining such a shift was the political commitment of the state's chief minister.

MGNREGA has become a powerful instrument for inclusive growth in rural India through its impact on social protection, livelihood security and democratic governance. The study examines the following facets relating to the implementation of the MGNREGA Scheme in Kerala:
1. To study the performance of workers under the scheme
2. To evaluate the employment status of rural people
3. To evaluate the impact of the scheme in rural development
4. To understand the women empowerment through MGNERGA

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment
Guarantee Act is known as a demand-driven
programme introduced with the legislative backing of
Parliament of India. It has contributed significantly to
provide the “freedom of choice” of work and dignified
work opportunities along with rights and entitlements
especially for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes,
women, landless, and other marginalised groups that
depend on traditional caste-based occupations and
agricultural landlords in the villages for their livelihoods.
This has largely contributed to protecting their
self-respect and dignity in workspaces and helped
control migration. However, the deep-rooted caste
system as well as the caste-based political domination in
villages affects the implementation of MGNREGA severely.
This paper examines the caste-based exclusion in the
implementation of MGNREGA, and the social audit and
follow-up action taken by the vigilance wing.

This chapter examines the ways in which Indian migrant labourers in Nagaland’s burgeoning urban capital aspire for better work opportunities, while negotiating lax labour laws, sectarian isolation, and elusive state entitlements in the midst of deeply-rooted customary laws, and larger unresolved political contingencies. Based on ethnography conducted between 2012 and 2013, the chapter argues that the lack of services and protections for migrant labourers in the state can be attributed to both longstanding negligence on the part of India’s policy makers and to significant cultural barriers. The chapter suggests four important developments that situate this argument in relation to socio-political patterns. First, postcolonial India has long privileged capitalist expansion over the politics of democracy, thus systematically ignoring migrant labour – despite its indisputable role in India’s growth. Second, in the context of Nagaland, constitutionally-protected customary laws and deeply-rooted segmentary social structures govern state resources and institutions, tethering state welfare programs and state-entitlements to village kinship groups. Third, as the church benefits from the increasing wealth of its members it is reluctant to confront corruption, often spiritualising social discontent. Finally, though the cheap labour of distress migration fuels Nagaland’s growth, re-emergent Naga nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment threaten to destabilise the tenuous political calm.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has led to the transformation of rural India through the infusion of an unprecedented degree of power and funds for the creation of works which lead to provision of employment while building up the asset base of rural areas, thereby contributing to their long term capacity for sustainable development. In 2013-14, 93.9 lakh works were taken up with a total expenditure of over Rs. 38,678.2 crores.Several studies have pointed out towards the massive potential of these works to build and develop rural India's natural capital, provide environmental services and contribute significantly towards mitigating climate change. However, whether and to what extent, this potential is being realised has not been adequately answered. This study is a humble attempt to answer this question. And also to provide a methodology for more extensive and widespread studies to answer the same question.

It also attempts to create a Green Index, which could act as a tool for policy makers, planners and communities to assess the environmental impact of NREGA works and help them plan an optimum mix of assets which lead to an overall improvement in natural capital. It departs significantly from previous studies of a similar nature, in realising that the nature of NREGA works is changing, and many of the newly concieved assets are not necessarily 'environmental' or 'natural resource based' assets and can in fact contribute significantly towards environmental degradation. Even the so-called natural resource based assets, in fact, can sometimes have significant negative effects on some environmental parameters while improving other environmental parameters. It is these realisations, and practical lessons learnt from the ground, which allow us to 'Go beyond Rhetoric' and develop practical tools which could help improve the environmental outcomes of NREGA.

For a country like India, employment generation plays a crucial role in its inclusive growth. MGNREGA is a large programme that was launched with unanimous support from all political parties with the objective of providing livelihood to the millions who strive to fulfil subsistence needs. It has not achieved its goal after almost a decade since its inception because of inefficiencies, corruption and misappropriations. With some major changes, these drawbacks and inefficiencies can be overcome.

Since the dawn of humanity, the importance of specific raw materials has led to their search in regions which are not easy to access. The case of specific rocks or stones, widely used as raw material and ubiquitous in most sites, is a case point. Yet many other materials (minerals, pigments or even wood) were also sourced and exploited in these areas. The development of archaeometry during the last decades has significantly increased our knowledge of not only the potential sources but also of the scope of their movement or distribution either by the same human groups that exploited them or as part of trade networks. Additionally, the recent advances on the landscape archaeology of mountain regions show that, far from acting as a natural border, they were a place of contacts and transit between the human societies inhabiting on their sides or even the nearby lowlands. The goal is to set up a debate about human behaviour and the relationships with the environment regarding raw material procurement, from a broad and diachronic point of view. We will address: • the analytical methods to characterize/identify these materials • the study of the sites/outcrops from a comprehensive perspective • the dynamics between the sourcing of these resources, the strategies to exploit them, the supply mechanisms and connections/commerce networks, • how the natural landscape shaped the cultural one • the changes/continuities derived from the exploitation of these areas through time, by comparing case studies from different mountain regions. Theme: The archaeology of material culture, bodies and landscapes Call for abstracts: until the 15 February 2018; oral papers of 15 min. max.; posters also welcome. For the guidelines see: www.e-a-a.org/EAA2018/Home/EAA2018

This note examines MGNREGA to understand how women’s economic empowerment (WEE) policy and programming can generate a ‘double boon’ – paid work that empowers women and provides more support for their unpaid care work responsibilities. The research was carried out using a mixed-methods approach in the districts of Dungarpur and Udaipur in Rajasthan, India with both MGNREGA participants and non-participants, with the additional criterion of them having at least one child under six years old.

Abstract. Abstract. An important question in labour economics is whether the presence in a work environment of friends or relations lowers or raises productivity. We examine the question using evidence from a simple field experiment in Uttar Pradesh, India with married wives and husbands. Teams of four are engaged to dig soil under the NREGA programme. In one treatment husbands and wives work together; in the other treatment they work in separate teams.

Financial Inclusion has been a long-term mission and for the last one and a half- decade. Governments have implemented various schemes through NREGA, Insurance for Individual and Crop in the name of PM Bhima Yojna, mandated banking operations with zero balance accounts for rural poor through PM Jan Dhan Yojna, and many more. The major concerns have been financial viability and scope of support services from parent banks to BCs. The study has taken a critical insight into these contexts along with the impact of government initiatives to understand the impact of Financial Inclusion in select districts of Telangana.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a demand-driven, social security program that guarantees a minimum of 100 days of wage employment to every household that demands work in the rural sector. The role of any employment guarantee program is much more than just guaranteeing work to the poor because guarantee alone will have a limited impact on employment generation in the economy in the long run. Therefore, one of the main aims of the act should be to effectively reduce the dependency of the people on the act itself.
Even though the act is primarily perceived as a social security program, it can play an important role in the creation of productive assets in rural areas .The aim of this paper is to see whether the creation of such productive assets in both public and private lands can reduce dependency of the people on the act, such that government can effectively reduce the burden on the subsidies, instead of attempting to try dilute the act to the poorest 2500 block.

Government services fail to meet targeted objectives in contexts of political instability. The links between enabling equitable access to these services and building a democratic state have not been sufficiently explicated in the local governance and state-building literature. The Indian state of Jharkhand, formed in 2000, is one instance where little is known about local access to services: the literature reflects a lack of local democracy but rarely considers the relationship between these aspects. Therefore, this study examines the processes through which local actors access benefits from two contrastingly-structured government services, using an access analysis framework. The empirical basis comprises two cases in Jharkhand’s forest villages: government service (i) in kendu leaf trade regulation, and (ii) of minimum-wage work opportunities for rural households. The objective of each is to benefit poor villagers such as the indigenous Ho people inhabiting these communities. The study explains through what mechanisms access occurs and the distribution of benefits this enables across local actors, then considers the implications for who governs access locally. It argues that privileged private actors not only use structural and relational mechanisms, such as gender, access to social networks, capital and technology, to access inequitably large benefit shares, but also to exercise institutional authority over services to enable such benefits. Through this recursive relation between access to services and local state-building, private actors partly comprise the local state. They govern access locally alongside government institutions, perpetuating inequitable access to government services and building an undemocratic local state in Jharkhand.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is India’s (and the world’s) largest employment scheme. While many analyses exist on the impact and implementation faults of this program, scant attention has been dedicated to how political dynamics have influenced implementation. This paper will try to fill this gap with evidence from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. It will argue that the implementation performance of the scheme has been fairly good, despite the abysmal performance of the state government with previous employment schemes; the key factor in determining such a shift was the political commitment of the state’s chief minister.

India's scheduled tribes are among the most deprived socio-economic groups and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme has great potential in tribal areas. While the Andhra Pradesh government has made an effort to ensure implementation of the scheme in the scheduled areas, the gap between administrative orders and the grass-roots level is wide. This article lists measures that could radically improve implementation of the scheme in tribal areas.

Financial Inclusion has been a long-term mission and for the last one and a halfdecade. Governments have implemented various schemes through NREGA, Insurance for Individual and Crop in the name of PM Bhima Yojna, mandated banking operations with zero balance accounts for rural poor through PM Jan Dhan Yojna, and many more. The major concerns have been financial viability and scope of support services from parent banks to BCs. The study has taken a critical insight into these contexts along with the impact of government initiatives to understand the impact of Financial Inclusion in select districts of Telangana.

The study examines the role of the largest public works program in the world—the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS)—in buffering the negative effects of early childhood exposure to rainfall shocks on long-term health outcomes. Exploiting the spatial and temporal variation in NREGS coverage, the study estimates the extent to which nutritional shocks in early childhood can be offset by access to the program. The study employs a unique identification strategy by integrating detailed administrative records of drought shock and phased rollout information of NREGS with household-level panel data—the Young Lives survey—conducted over three waves (2002, 2007, and 2009–10) in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. Using individual fixed effects estimation, the study finds that while the policy does not help correct for long-term past health deficiencies it is useful in buffering recent drought shocks, which vary by policy relevant subgroups

In this paper, we study the impact of MGNREGS on the beneficiaries and analyse potential management problems of the implementing agencies in Bardhaman, a relatively prosperous district of West Bengal. Analysis of official documents and primary data collection in all blocks over a period of three years indicates that Bardhaman has been successful in addressing the challenges of running the scheme. However, because of available alternative employment opportunities, conducting MGNREGS matching the Annual Action Plan is a serious challenge to the GPs. The local people look for less labour intensive schemes, and political parties pressurise Gram Panchayats to initiate popular errands which makes it difficult to match village needs with demands.

Sustainable development depends on the complex set of interactions between the natural environment, the society we live and economic conditions. The relationship between humans and the environment is like 'one will give and other will take', during which equilibrium may get distracted. Economics leverages the growth potential of the society and society is influenced by the natural environment. To maintain the equilibrium between these three pillars of sustainable development there is a need to link them. Transparency during the execution of large-scale projects plays a pivotal role in achieving sustainable development and enables the balance between the environment, society, and economy. In recent times, the governments of many countries have adopted programs for improving the living standards, food security and improved nutrition, health, clean water and sanitation, education, and other aspects of sustainable development goals. This article reports the transparency methods that are implemented for MGNREGA project and articulates the role of transparency in linking between the three dimensions of sustainable development: environment, society, and economics. The paper emphasizes that the mechanism of transparency should reside in all sides of the triangle of sustainability.

Employment generated under MNREGA has been on the decline in recent years across India. This column analyses whether political dynamics influence the implementation of MNREGA by contrasting the implementation models of two of the top performing states – Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. It concludes that a combination of the top-down, supply-driven approach of AP and the demand-driven Rajasthan model is required. - See more at: http://ideasforindia.in/article.aspx?article_id=356#sthash.wnhuuJMa.dpuf