THE CHASE AND THE CHANGE

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has shown what it can achieve by putting water conservation at its core

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Reporting by: Sushmita Sengupta, New Delhi; G Ram Mohan, Ananthapuramu, Andhra Pradesh; Anil Ashwani Sharma, Sidhi, Madhya Pradesh; K A Shaji, Palakkad, Kerala; Bhagirath, Jalaun, Uttar Pradesh, and Tikamgarh, Madhya Pradesh; Ajit Panda, Balangir, Odisha; Aishwarya Sudha Govindarajan, Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu; Anand Dutt, Pakur, Jharkhand; Jayanta Basu, Bankura, West Bengal; Swati Bhatia, Dungarpur, Rajasthan, and Sirsa, Haryana; Tamanna Naseer, Chitradurga, Karnataka; Mohd Imran Khan, Kaimur, Bihar; Ishan Kukreti, Jalna, Maharashtra; Shagun Kapil, Ranga Reddy, Telangana; Jumana Shah, Sabarkantha, Gujarat

THE IDEA was simple: to chronicle the change the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or MGNREGA has brought in the lives of people in rural India. It turned out to be a task easier said than done. Fourteen correspondents covered a staggering 16,000 km in 15 states across the country (see map), hampered by restrictions posed by a pandemic, to gauge the impact of the world’s largest public wage programme in its 15th year of implementation.

A country where labour is the only capital for at least 50 per cent of the workforce, the programme guarantees, through a legal framework, at least 100 days of waged employment a year to households in rural India. This has made MGNREGA a much sought-after initiative for sustenance ever since it was implemented in 2006. Data on the MGNREGA website shows that on any given day, some 15 million people work under the programme at 1.4 million sites. In 15 years of implementation, it has generated than 31 billion person days of employment and the government has spent over R6.4 lakh crore on this demand-driven programme.