Name: K. Avini Sharma
Country: India

Year: 2014
Volume: Volume-1, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 1-10

NREGA is one of the most important programmes ever launched’ for rural India. Although it has been positioned and popularized as social security and livelihood scheme but it also have a very important connotations for economy as a whole. NREGS has not only emerged as ray of hope for millions of poor and marginalized families in rural India but also as a massive rural investment program, which has promise to take India’s growth in top gear. This scheme is gradually building physical assets in rural India which is visible, sustainable, technically sound and being monitored by people themselves.
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) - or the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, as it is now known - was introduced in 200 of India’s poorest districts in August 2005, and extended to cover all rural areas of the country in 2008. The NREGA provided for a hundred days of unskilled manual work per rural household, at the state-wise minimum wage (subject to a national minimum) and within 5 km of the worker’s place of residence. Poverty reduction schemes have historically been a significant part of India’s public works programs. However the NREGA stands out as being the first of its kind to provide the right to employment to the rural poor. As an Act rather than a Scheme, it is more durable, provides more security to the workers and cannot be cancelled or changed without an amendment in Parliament, all features that are desirable from the point of view of poverty reduction and improvement of the livelihoods of rural agricultural laborers (see Dey and Dr`eze [2007] for more details on the provisions of the Act).