619,097

This is the number of assets created across rural India in the four months since the COVID-19 lockdown to tap natural resources. This is also the potential of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA), a programme envisaged to alleviate poverty among the rural people by using their only capital—labour. So, what has helped the program that over the years got mired in controversies make a comeback? Down To Earth travels to districts that witnessed reverse migration on a large scale to understand this transition. They find a script that can change the rural-urban dynamics forever. Demand for MGNREGA works shows an unprecedented spike—more than 30 million households have asked for employment for three consecutive months. Governments are harnessing the surplus labour to create assets that will ensure livelihood even after people are weaned off the wage support. People too are using this opportunity to pick up the pieces of their lives in villages they had once left.

- SHAGUN KAPIL, KUNDAN PANDEY, ANIL ASHWANI SHARMA, VIVEK MISHRA, SUSHMITA SENGUPTA, ISHAN KUKRETI, RAJU SAJWAN, RAJIT SENGUPTA & SEEMA SHARMA

HAS THE next batch of work been sanctioned?” asks Ram Ratan from a distance, sitting amid the sweating crowd waiting in silence on a humid July afternoon at the panchayat office of Dhurala village in Haryana’s Kurukshetra district. As always, he is dressed in neatly ironed trousers, shirt and sandals. With a post-graduate degree in psychology, he is among the most qualified youths in the village. The official responds, “Yes. We are in talks with the irrigation department about cleaning and de-silting a canal and with the Indian Railways about clearing the tracks.” The news pacifies the crowd, including Ratan, waiting eagerly for more work under the country’s largest public wage programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, popularly known by its acronym MGNREGA. The programme, implemented in 691 of the country’s 739 districts, is in fact dubbed the world’s largest state-sponsored job-scheme to eradicate poverty.

As per its preamble, MGNREGA aims to enhance the livelihood security of rural households by guaranteeing them “100 days of unskilled manual work” every financial year. At least 75 per cent of the total works must be related to water conservation, the Act mandates.