Livelihood security potential of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, later renamed as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), is the most comprehensive initiative to ensure livelihood security with an ultimate aim of poverty reduction. This workfare program guarantees 100 days of employment to every rural household whose members are willing to do unskilled manual labour at the statutory minimum wage. The present study is a modest effort to have an overview of the effectiveness of implementation of mgnrega in terms of its country wide impact on employment generation. The MGNREGA implementation status report unfolds that the programme has already provided employment to more than 48 million households across 28 states and 5 union territories. The study also brings forth the empirical evidence of MGNREGA's role in the rural economy of Punjab based on the primary data of 120 beneficiaries in three districts viz. Hoshiarpur, Amritsar and Gurdaspur. The study shows that MGNREGA has so far been successful to some extent in enhancing the livelihood security of rural households by accounting for nearly 10 percent of the family income of the beneficiaries of the scheme.