NREGA ( national rural employment guarantee scheme) write up with World Bank criticism for the course CURRENT AFFAIRS

NREGA write up

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credits and references given in the file itself.

Conclusion

NREGA has been one of the most celebrated and one of the most successful programs of the Indian government in its 60 year history. Some of the chief players in conceiving this programme have been the bureaucracy, the planning commission, and the government in general. It is not only a programme which has taken the effort of the best of bureaucrats and economists, but also a result of the various attempts made over a number of years, in the name of planning and other policy makings. Apart from the basic outline of NREGA there have been various other implications to NREGA such as the general price rise in the daily wages of the labourers and the general increase in the number of people needed to implement it. Causing a higher supply of jobs than envisaged by the programme.

The other major impact that NREGA has had, has been on the political parties. It has managed to trigger the urge in the political parties to serve the poor in the rural areas, causing a sort of reverse effect. Normally it is the parties who have developmental initiatives, and have campaigns of their own. But NREGA caused almost every political party to think about it as a tool for popularity among the poor. For once in the history of political India, any party has decided to implement a programme introduced by someone else, and also has done that to improve its own image.

The World Bank had its own takes on NREGA, and as is always the case with the World Bank, it came up with a completely skewed observation about it. Its statements that NREGA was clogging urbanisation and was also making land owning farmers’ lives uncomfortable were criticised the most in the Indian media. The world bank’s basic assumptions that it is the producer who is more important than the consumer and the assumption the urbanisation was desirable over rural development were seen as the biggest flaws in its argument. And once again proved its skewedness towards the capitalist countries, from which it is funded. Whether the world bank likes it or not, NREGA remains one of the most well drafted policies by the Indian government, something that is truly (for once) thinking about the poor.