Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA)

                In 2005, India’s parliament passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which is the central government’s response to the constitutionally manifested right to work and means to promote livelihood security in India’s rural areas. To this end, the Act guarantees 100 days of annual employment at statutory minimum wage rates to any rural household whose adult members are willing to do unskilled manual work. The manual work needs to create sustainable assets that promote the economic and infrastructure development of villages. Implemented in three phases beginning in 2006, the Act extended to all of rural India in April 2008. NREGA is an innovative answer to the long-standing problem of providing social safety nets in rural areas. The overall objective of this paper is to bring focus on Issues and challenges of MGNREGA and to evaluate the performance since its enactment. Apart from academic perspective on the need, relevance and justification for the MGNREGA, it also seeks to establish a dialogue between academics and policy makers with those who are working at grass root level to monitor the functioning of the MGNREGA. Another objective of the paper is to bring together all these diverse experiences on a common platform to arrive at some common understandings on the problems faced in implementation of MGNREGA and also to learn from the successes in implementing MGNREGA.