One Tool To Track It All

Can the humongous online data generated in the job guarantee scheme be a real time index for rural distress?

- Shagun Kapil

IT IS a tool of unparalleled proportions and potential. It draws on data generated to track the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), links it to rural distress in real-time and enables quick delivery of relief measures.

MGNREGA employs at any point in time over 100 million people across the country. This is half of Uttar Pradesh’s population. By design, it is a distress reduction scheme implemented in half-a-million villages. By default, it mirrors the state of distress at the village and district levels. But its use as an index to gauge real-time rural distress has only just been recognized and spoken about at the national level.

In 2018, four management researchers found the link. Prasanna Tantri, Shradhey Parijat Prasad and Nishka Sharma from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, and Sumit Agarwal from the National University of Singapore had been researching MGNREGA.

They correlated India Meteorological Department’s drought data with the demand for and supply of MGNREGA jobs at the block level and realized that whenever a district faced drought, there was a spike in the number of people employed. They analyzed data for 2012 to 2017, expanded the study to 600-odd districts in the country, and found that the trend was valid almost everywhere. Since MGNREGA data is updated daily, it could be used to highlight a problem in real-time. They used parameters like job demand and developed an Index for Localised Distress (ILD) and an online interactive map to show areas facing normal, moderate and critical distress from 2016 to 2018.