How Successful are 10 years of MGNREGA:
MGNREGA SCHEME:
- promises unskilled manual work for 100 days, to adult person of all rural households
- it is a rights based employment guarantee programme, with a demand driven approach.
FACTS:
- world’s largest social welfare programme
- In last 10 years, 3.14 lakh crores spent on the scheme
- 1980 cr person days of employment generated
- The scheme has arguably, managed to lift several lakhs of villagers out of rural poverty
HOW HAS IT FARED SO FAR:
- It has shown mixed results
THE POSITIVES:
- It has brought about a positive change in the rural labour
- It has achieved its objective of mitigating rural poverty, where ever it is implemented genuinely and meaningfully.
- Where ever, it has not been implemented meaningfully, it has given some amount of bargaining power to the people or rural labourers and is working as a market mechanism
LIMITATIONS AND CHALLENGES:
- There are allegations and also empirical evidences of leakages and corurption in payment of wages
- There are no meaningful and permanent assets being created
- The temporary assets are of not much significance
- It is the only law in the world with a provision of social audit, but , unfortunately, there is no regular social audit being carried out
- The local population and villages have no say in deciding the type of work or the amount of work
- so, is it really a demand driven scheme? its a question which generates mixed response
CONCLUSION:
- The experts are divided on their opinion about the type of assets to be created. some even say that, AADHAR and JAN DHAN, which have supposedly plugged the leakages, is not completely reliable or true. The scheme suffers from multiple challenges of fake accounts, sub-optimal quality of assets , top-down decision making and many others. Therefore, government needs to rework and plug the leakages through consensus. The villagers and the gram panchayats need to be empowered to make decisions. There has to be a systematic monitoring mechanism through regular social audit and constant vigil.
Frequently asked Questions Related to Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005
Q1
What was the objective of MGNREGA?
The MGNREGA was initiated with the objective of “enhancing livelihood security in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year, to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work”
Q2
What was one of the major criticism of MGNREGA?
A major criticism of the MGNREGA is that a lot of money disbursed by the government gets siphoned off by middlemen, thus leaving a number of MGNREGA workers either with unpaid wages or less than standard wages. In Mahuadand, Jharkhand, most of the people who had worked under the MGNREGA did not get paid, while some either got paid less than stipulated or were given 5 kg of rice by private contractors instead.
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