Asset Creation Under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act: A Study of Selected States of India

Abstract

MGNREGA Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was initiated to improve employment in the rural areas and alleviate poverty in India. It has broader goals of fortifying livelihoods, establishing sustainable and efficient assets, encouraging environmental preservation, women empowerment, and enhancing social inclusion. Nevertheless, available research findings give a mixed picture especially on the quality and sustainability of assets that are developed under the programme. This paper will look at the scale and efficiency of rural assets created by MGNREGA in selected state of India. It aims at filling the gaps that exist in the literature by comparing the performance as well as distributional results of assets creation under the scheme. The data under analysis is based on secondary data according to the official database on MGNREGA that is preserved by the Ministry of Rural Development. The research is centered on the Kerala, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan-states that were selected as that of divergent developmental trends, population and histories of the institutional development of the local governance. It is revealed that in the majority of the surveyed states, the rates of project completion are less than 50 percent, and in Kerala, the performance is relatively higher due to its relatively high implemented rates. The main employment indicators such as the average person-days of work generated per household and the share of households that do 100 days of work, are significantly lower in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. Despite the high rates of fund utilisation in both Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the financial outlay has not been associated with equal amounts of employment creation, and this implies that there exist inefficiencies in the implementation of the programmes. In Kerala, agricultural asset creation has recorded a completion rate of approximately 40 percent as opposed to approximately 20 percent in the rest of the states. Also, new projects have been largely focused on irrigation and land development of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households, Bihar, Maharashtra and Rajasthan states have allocated almost 90 percent of such works in private SC/ST lands. MGNREGA is still significant in generating employment in the rural areas, but the results of asset-focused interventions, especially associated with water and soil conservation, are still small. The small number of projects completed, along with low employment rates in various states, has limited the ability of the scheme to reinforce the rural infrastructure because of its limited focus. These results demonstrate the necessity to plan more strategically, control technically and diversify works so that the long-term developmental objectives of MGNREGA could be realised successfully.