Insights into success factors and challenges of NREGA

Abstract

It is obvious to any casual observer that poverty is quite rampant in India. In the year 2005, World Bank has estimated that 42 per cent of India s population is below the poverty line of one dollar a day. Planning Commission of India puts the below poverty population to be around 27 per cent. Government of India has tried different economic and administrative approaches to tackling the problem of poverty, with limited success. There have been a set of Wage Employment and Self Employment programmes tried by the Government. The poverty alleviation programmes, administered hitherto, have not greatly succeeded for a variety of reasons. Studies indicate that some of the reasons are inappropriate target selection, mal-administration, multiplicity of agencies involved in implementing schemes, lack of convergence between schemes, absence of usage of technology in administration of schemes leading to inefficiencies and leakages, and corruption. Since 2005, the Government of India has focused on NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) as the flagship poverty alleviation scheme. NREGA is a judicially enforceable wage employment programme which guarantees, up to 100 days of employment, to at least one adult of every household in India. NREGA has the twin objectives of employment creation and rural asset creation. Bulk of the rural asset creation that is envisaged by the programme is meant to improve rural agriculture and agricultural viability through projects, such as, Watershed Development, Drought Proofing, Rejuvenation of water tables, Improving soil fertility and Improving rural connectivity. There are quite a lot of counts on which NREGA has overcome the weaknesses of the earlier poverty alleviation schemes. Some notable ones are 1) Demand driven programme and hence better target self selection 2) Implemented through the Panchayati Raj Institutions and hence less overheads 3) High Implementation Efficiency through usage of Information Technology 4) Promoting gender equality (same wages for men and women) 5) Return of Investment through economically useful rural asset creation. The common criticisms on the program are 1) Only a palliative measure and does not remove the root cause of poverty 2) The objective of providing employment always takes precedence over the objective of rural asset creation and thereby leading to no or wasteful asset creation 3) Certain provisions of the Act(viz. Permissible Works and 60:40 Labour to material ratio) constrains the creation of meaningful and useful assets 5) Has the risk of being a moral hazard (easy work option, populist tool with Governments).This report is on the insights gained into the success factors and analysis of criticisms of the NREGA programme through field visits to two districts (Kolar and Mandya) of Karnataka. The focus of the study and the report were the below: a) Identifying and understanding the success factors which enable a successful programme implementation b) Analyse the merits and demerits of the common criticisms of NREGA and explore possible solutions to overcome those This report identifies a set of success factors. The prominent ones are 1) Presence of a social pressure group 2) Strength and the role of the Gram Sabha in innovatively choosing projects 3) Managerial style of the state NREGA apparatus 5) Citizen involvement. All the identified success factors are elaborated in detail in the report. The report also analyses the merits and demerits of all the criticisms of the programme. The criticisms are discussed and analysed in detail and based on the responses of the field interviewees the criticisms are graded for their validity, importance, extent, status (whether still open or solved). All the criticisms, save two, were found to be not very valid and for some criticisms, answers have been already found in the field. Though the list of appreciations/positives of the programme was not the focus of the study, for the sake of completeness, they have also been listed. The report also includes some high level descriptions of some of the potential concern areas of the programme. There is also one section which collates all the suggestions/ideas from the field about overcoming some weaknesses or further enriching the programme.