Schemes

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act(MGNREGA)

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA) was notified on September 7, 2005. The mandate of the Act is to provide at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

Some features of MGNREGA are:

The MGNREGA has given rise to the largest employment programme in human history and is unlike any other wage employment programme in its scale, architecture and thrust. Its bottom-up, people centred, demand-driven, self-selecting, rights-based design is distinct and unprecedented.
It is a demand-driven programme where provision of work is triggered by the demand for work by wage-seekers.
There are legal provisions for allowances and compensation both in cases of failure to provide work on demand and delays in payment of wages for work undertaken.
This bottom-up, people-centred, demand-driven architecture also means that a great share of the responsibility for the success of the MGNREGA lies with wage-seekers, GSs and GPs.
MGNREGA also marks a break from the relief programmes of the past towards an integrated natural resource management and livelihoods generation perspective.
Social audit is a new feature that is an integral part of MGNREGA. Potentially, this creates unprecedented accountability of performance, especially towards immediate stakeholders.