MGNREGA AND ITS IMPACT ON PUNJAB

Abstract

Abstract

Poverty is one of the main issues in India, attracting the attention of sociologists, economists and political class equally. Government of India has been running many poverty-alleviation programmes and some success also achieved in this endeavour over the years. However, even today Governments struggle with mass level of poverty and related problems. In this context, the Indian Government has implemented the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in recent past to complement the income of the poor by providing them employment for certain number of the poor by providing them employment for certain number of labour days in the year. It provides an alternative source of livelihood which will have an impact on reducing migration, restricting child labour, alleviating poverty, and making villages self-sustaining through productive assets creation such as road construction, cleaning up of water tanks, soil and water conservation work, etc. For which it has been considered as the largest anti-poverty programme in the world. But the success of this Act depends upon its proper implementation. We have analysed the impact of NREGA scheme in some districts in (Majha, Malwa, Doaba) Punjab. Government of India has been consistency implementing this scheme to eradicate poverty and employment since 2005. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is an Indian job guarantee scheme. MNREGA has been in operations in most of the States in India since its inception. Some reports have already examined the effectiveness of MNREGA about its ability to empower rural masses. In this context, an attempt has been made in this study to analyse the impact of NREGA on rural labour market, income of the poor households and overall agriculture production using secondary data for six districts of Punjab. The study found that MGNREGA has positively impacted rural people in Punjab but this impact seems to be less significant. However, the results of the study may not be generalized to other districts of Punjab as the evidence is scant in nature. In this regard, extensive empirical works needs to be the demand of future work in this area.