MGNREGA: Overview

Ravishankar recently pointed out to me that, a project that we did as part of our classwork for a course titled 'current affairs', has been published on the website of Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India. 

Here is the link.

It feels good, although we did not intend it to be that. We prepared an overview of various critiques and supporting arguments and presented some of our own analysis. We also used a lot of resources form MKSS and NREGA's own website. Finally, we included our insights from the work that we did in Bihar while auditing the project implementation.

NREGA is sometimes derisively referred to as MAREGA. But I guess that is just an angry upper-middle class reacting against the fact that, otherwise poorly paid workers are now getting a good deal near their homes. I would not explore many of the macro-economic criticisms here (its impact on inflation, budget deficit, labor supply, agriculture etc), since some of them hold merit and need in-depth analysis. For the rest, you can check the link.