Subhasish Dey (2010)

A cross-sectional survey of Birbhum district in West Bengal, India builds an assessment of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in terms of outreach, efficiency in job provisioning and impact on standard of living.

One of the largest employment generation programmes in the world was launched in the form of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in India in 2006. Adopting a rights-based approach, the NREGS is backed by a law which gives the constitutional right to a minimum of 100 days employment to every citizen in rural areas. The NREGS is unique in nature as it is the demand for employment by poor people that drives the creation of public works. The process is conceptualized to be coordinated by local self-governments in a participative fashion. The principle of self-targeting for the poor in embedded in the scheme, which makes provisions only for unskilled job creation at compensations pegged to prevalent minimum wages.
           
The rights-based approach makes the programme transformative in nature as it intrinsically leads to greater awareness among the poor rural labour regarding their rights and has the possibility of organizing them with better bargaining powers. This is important in the wake of the multi-layered discrimination of caste, class and gender that rural labour in India is usually exposed to. The NREGA has assumed all the more significance in rural India due to the stagnating conditions of agricultural production in the recent decades. The agrarian crisis in certain regions and the larger agricultural stagnation has led to large-scale farmer indebtedness, leading to farm suicides and quitting of farming in certain pockets of the country. This has, in turn, squeezed employment opportunities in rural areas.
           
In this context, the NREGS comes as an important intervention in creating non-farm employment opportunities, building rural productive assets like water management systems or rural roads and arresting the ever-increasing out-migration to urban areas. In that sense, the NREGS acts as a safety valve that can prevent any depression of living standards in rural areas. The programme, with a budget outlay of USD 7.8 billion in 2009-10, has now become an integral part of the rural economy.
           
Dey studies some major aspects of NREGS through a cross-sectional household survey done in July-August, 2009 in Birbhum district in the state, West Bengal. The study is based on a representative sample drawn from 13 Gram Panchayats (lowest tier of the local self governments), chosen through stratified sampling to account for varying levels of development. The sample constituted of 500 randomly chosen households with 2249 persons. The paper interrogates three aspects of the NREGS, namely, to what extent self-targeting works, the efficiency of the Panchayats in providing jobs and the livelihood outcomes for participating households.
           
In terms of outreach, the programme has done considerably well. While 99.6 percent of the sample households were aware of the scheme, much higher than some of the other government schemes, 84.6 percent of households had applied for a job-card under the scheme. Within job-card holders, around 93 percent applied for jobs and nearly 90 percent got employment for at least a day since the inception of the programme in 2006. The results further show that the self-targeting principle of the scheme worked to some extent to provide proportionally higher amount of employment to the poor. While 43.5 percent of the households were classified as ‘Below Poverty Line’, nearly 53 percent of the jobs went to this category in the last one year. However, the demarcating line between the poor and non-poor (Above Poverty Line or APL) is slightly ambiguous in this respect. The APL population was also engaged in NREGS work significantly and 47 percent of the jobs went to them.
           
The considerably high participation in NREGS of the APL population is further indicated by the land-holding and consumption expenditure statistics of NREGS workers. Around 90 percent of the households in the sample owned less than 1 hectare. While roughly 40 percent of the households working under NREGS had no land, an interesting fact that emerges from the study is that the highest number of man-days worked was by the topmost land-holding class above 1 hectare (94.5 man-days against an average of 65.4 man-days).

The distribution of man-days across consumption expenditure classes reveal that nearly 68 percent of the total man-days went to households that had a per capita monthly expenditure above Rs. 400 (around USD 9). Given that the poverty line in West Bengal is Rs. 382, it is clear that large number of ‘officially non-poor’ households were participating in the job-guarantee scheme. This is possibly due to the fact that poverty lines in India has been defined too low and it has been pointed out by studies that large proportions of the rural APL population live under vulnerable conditions.

Some notable features unearthed by the study regarding programme implementation were the delay in payment of wages, inadequate job-creation and institutional distortions in delivery. Since, the inception of the programme, the average time lag between commencement of work and wage payment has been 27 days, higher than the statutory time lag of 15 days. The major lacuna in implementation has been the fact that on average, households have received only 20 days of employment as opposed to the minimum 100 days promised under the scheme. This is in line with the overall poor job-creation under NREGS in West Bengal in these initial years.

Also most of the jobs were created not during the lean employment season but more towards the end of the financial year. Political affiliations also influenced to some extent the number of days of employment that households could get under the scheme.

From the point of view of influencing livelihood outcomes, the NREGS appeared to have limited impact. Two-third of the respondents stated that they would find other jobs if NREGS was absent. However, it was evident from the data and case studies that workers preferred NREGS jobs to private jobs like stone crushing, etc. largely due to the better and favourable working conditions of the former. The average daily wage in the NREGS scheme at Rs. 87 was slightly higher than the wages in the informal sector (Rs. 77). Also, the large distances, that workers have to travel to look for private jobs, often without success, was another reason why they are more willing to work under the NREGS scheme.

The study notes that the limited impact of NREGS on standards of living was primarily due to the meager creation of jobs, at an annual average of only 20 days per household. Thus, better implementation of the scheme with timely creation of more employment, as in some of the other Indian states, can potentially transform the lives of the rural workers and their family members.