Right to Work and Rural India
Working of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)
- Ashok Pankaj - Council for Social Development, New Delhi
This comprehensive book is an attempt to understand the working of the operational part of this act—the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme (MGNREGS). The expert contributors to this book have presented evidences of implementation and impact of the scheme across India, including both agriculturally developed states and the backward ones, and states where the scheme is better implemented as well as those where it is not. Their essays go on to explain the meaning, context, issues and development policy implications of MGNREGS through theoretical and empirical papers, thus providing answers to questions regarding:
- The timing and purpose of the legislation, and the design and structure of the program
- Desirability of state-sponsored employment programs in the era of liberalization
- The likely impacts of such a massive wage employment and public works program
This volume offers an insight into the changing thrust of India's anti-poverty program and her experiments with various employment schemes.
The book is extremely timely...[and] is a must-read for policy-makers as well researchers who can get a clearer picture on what to evaluate, how to evaluate and how to place a specific national programme in the larger framework of development economics.
Right to Work and Rural India is a welcome addition to the literature. This book makes an important contribution to the scholarship on the MGNREGS....this volume is appealing because it asks the bigger questions about what role the scheme can play given the trends of agriculture, unemployment, wage work, and poverty in rural India today. It avoids taking shallow ideological positions, and is generally well-evidenced. It will be useful resource for scholars, researchers and policymakers interested in the Indian economy.