Abstract
The basic objective of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is to provide safety net for the rural poor and stabilize agricultural production through creating productive assets via employing labourers under this programme. In broader perspective, MGNREGS aims to reduce rural poverty by improving the rural livelihood channels. Having that been said, we here apply a quasi-experimental investigation to get an impression of the impact of the implementation of MGNREGS on an important outcome of interest, viz., average monthly income. The study is based on primary data collected from four gram panchayats of two randomly selected blocks of Birbhum district of West Bengal considering 2012–2013 as the reference period. The study observes that the heterogeneity in seeking employment through MGNREGS is panchayat-specific. As a result, the performance of the implementation of MGNREGS depends both qualitatively and quantitatively to a large extent on the efficacy of the panchayat. However, the result of the analysis shows that getting employment through MGNREGS helps the rural households to improve their livelihood.
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Notes
- 1.
The annual outlay of MGNREGS was 0.31 % of the GDP covering 21 million households in 2006−2007, and it immensely increased to 1.29 % of the GDP covering 54.95 million households in 2011−2012 (www.nrega.nic.in).
- 2.
By census definition, marginal workers are those who do not work for the major part of the year, which could be either due to the lack of opportunities or other reasons.
- 3.
Farmers who own up to 1 ha of land are called marginal farmers.
- 4.
Here, total cost includes cost of seeds, hand tractors/bullocks, different fertilizers at purchase price, pesticides at purchase price, water, hired labour in terms of total wage bill and other costs if any.
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Kundu, A., Talukdar, S. (2016). The Impact of MGNREGS on Rural Households: Evidence from a Quasi-experiment. In: Banerjee, S., Mukherjee, V., Haldar, S. (eds) Understanding Development. India Studies in Business and Economics. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2455-6_14
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