The Impact of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India – An overview
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Since independence, one of the major challenges faced by successive governments of India has been the provision of adequate remunerative employment to the vast majority of rural workers who are unemployed or, more commonly underemployed in meager subsistence livelihood activities. The Indian Constitution addressed the issue in the Directive Principles of State Policy that according to Article 39, the state must ensure that “citizens, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood” and Article 41 decrees that “the state, shall within the limits of its economic capacity and development, make effective provision for securing Right to Work….” In the first three decades of planning, from the 1950s to the early 1980s, employment growth was seen as incumbent upon faster economic growth. However growth in these decades was too low to absorb the growing labor force. Though there was rising unemployment, the right to guaranteed work did not emerge as a policy priority because of the resource constraints associated with the slow growing economy. However, from time to time the government of India did undertake public works related wage employment programs since the 1960s. These programs were mostly ad-hoc in nature, had limited impact on the generation of employment, and lacked proper planning in relation to the creation of assets. As a result, most, assets created were of poor quality and often suffered from poor maintenance. These programs did not make any lasting impact either on rural unemployment or in improving rural resources. By experiencing all these problem of unemployment in India, now government has introduced Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) to improve the employment opportunities particularly for rural people. This Article deals with the impact of MGNREGA scheme in rural India.
Author: Rakesh Deskar
Institution: Bangalore University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4410462807