Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005
National Emblem of India
Parliament of India
  • An Act to provide for the enhancement of livelihood security of the households in rural areas of the country by providing at least one hundred days of guaranteed wage employment in every financial year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.
Citation42 (PDF). 2005.
Territorial extentRepublic of India
Passed byLok Sabha
Passed23 August 2005[1]
Passed byRajya Sabha
Passed25 August 2005[2]
Assented to5 September 2005[2]
Commenced2 February 2006[1]
Legislative history
First chamber: Lok Sabha
Bill titleThe National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill, 2005
Introduced byRaghuvansh Prasad Singh, Minister of Rural Development
Introduced22 March 2005
Amended by
National Rural Employment Guarantee (Amendment) Act, 2009[3]
Keywords
MGNREGA, NREGA, MNREGA
Status: In force

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 or MGNREGA, earlier known as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or NREGA,[3] is an Indian social welfare measure that aims to guarantee the 'right to work'. This act was passed on 23 August 2005[1] and was implemented in February 2006 under the UPA government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh following tabling of the bill in parliament by the Minister for Rural Development Raghuvansh Prasad Singh.

It aims to enhance livelihood security in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of assured and guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to at least one member of every Indian rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.[4][5][6] Women are guaranteed one third of the jobs made available under the MGNREGA and efforts are made to ensure that at least 50%.[7] Another aim of MGNREGA is to create durable assets (such as roads, canals, ponds and wells). Employment is to be provided within 5 km of an applicant's residence, and minimum legal wage under the law is to be paid. If work is not provided within 15 days of applying, applicants are entitled to an unemployment allowance. That is, if the government fails to provide employment, it has to provide certain unemployment allowances to those people. Thus, employment under MGNREGA is a legal entitlement. Apart from providing economic security and creating rural assets, other things said to promote NREGA are that it can help in protecting the environment, empowering rural women, reducing rural-urban migration and fostering social equity, among others."[8]

The act was first proposed in 1991 by then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.[9] It was finally accepted in the parliament and commenced implementation in 625 districts of India. Based on this pilot experience, NREGA was scoped up to cover all the districts of India from 1 April 2008.[10] The statute was praised by the government as "the largest and most ambitious social security and public works program in the world".[11] In 2009 the World Bank had chided the act along with others for hurting development through policy restrictions on internal movement.[12] However in its World Development Report 2014, the World Bank called it a "stellar example of rural development".[13] MGNREGA is to be implemented mainly by gram panchayats (GPs). The law stated it provides many safeguards to promote its effective management and implementation. The act explicitly mentions the principles and agencies for implementation, list of allowed works, financing pattern, monitoring and evaluation, and detailed measures to ensure transparency and accountability.[14]

  1. ^ a b c "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on MGNREGA Operational Guidelines 2013" (PDF). June 2014.
  2. ^ a b "National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005" (PDF). Retrieved 14 September 2022.
  3. ^ a b "National Rural Employment Guarantee (Amendment) Act, 2009" (PDF). loksabhaph.nic.in. Retrieved 14 September 2022.
  4. ^ Ministry of Rural Development 2005, p. 1.
  5. ^ Chitravanshi, Ruchika (8 October 2015). "Nationwide review of rural job scheme NREGS ordered by government". The Economic Times. Archived from the original on 6 April 2016. Retrieved 10 April 2022.
  6. ^ Comptroller and Auditor General of India 2013b, p. i.
  7. ^ Chandra, Bipan; Mukherjee, Aditya; Mukherjee, Mridula (2008). India Since Independence. Penguin Books India. p. 374. ISBN 978-0-14-310409-4.
  8. ^ Ministry of Rural Development 2005, pp. 1–2.
  9. ^ Seetapati, Vinay (1 February 2015). Half - Lion: How P.V Narasimha Rao Transformed India (1st ed.). New Delhi: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0670088225.
  10. ^ Ministry of Rural Development 2005, p. 10.
  11. ^ Ministry of Rural Development 2012, p. ix.
  12. ^ "World Bank sees NREGA as a barrier to economic development". The Economic Times. PTI. 15 March 2009. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  13. ^ "World Bank calls NREGA a stellar example of rural development". The Economic Times. 10 October 2013. Archived from the original on 13 October 2013.
  14. ^ Dutta, Sujoy (2015). An uneven path to accountability: A comparative study of MGNREGA in two states of India (Report). Research Papers in Economics.