The World’s Largest Employment Guarantee Program: Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA)

Abstract

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a pro-poor, rural development-oriented guaranteed employment program for the vulnerable, marginalized, and backward rural people. Provisions under MGNREGA allow a rural beneficiary to work for maximum of 100 days in a year. Every year, in the vicinity of their respective villages, millions of rural Indians work in this gigantic and world’s largest public works program. The consensus-driven approach and no gender and caste-based discrimination have been stellar features of MGNREGA. MGNREGA aims to provide the rural people with a social security through its guaranteed employment mechanism. MGNREGA underlines the importance of sustainable development by creating useful assets in and around villages. Despite a huge list of salient features, MGNREGA suffers from several issues such as fake job cards, ghost workers, poor quality of assets, delays in payment, not getting the work on time, poor and irregular communication dissemination, and low level of awareness on major entitlements such unemployment allowances, same wages for men and women, worksite facilities and the consensus-driven approach. Due to the unawareness of major entitlements a lot of rural people do not get work on time, do not know about the objectives of the scheme and often get misguided by the higher ranked officials. Citing the mentioned challenges, several lawmakers, public policy experts, and academicians have called for reforms or situation-based changes for MGNREGA structure and functioning.