Performance of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) : A Review of Women Employment

National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, later renamed as “Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act” (MGNREGA) is an Act which guarantees the “right to work” in rural India. MGNREGA in its framework has provisions for creation of durable rural assets with the Panchayats as the nodal agency for providing job cards. The Act has employment norms and gender sensitive provisions to ensure participation of rural women workers. Now, MGNREGA has completed well over a decade of existence so it is important to understand how far MGNREGA has become successful in creating sustainable assets through employment generation. In this paper an attempt has been made to study the performance of MGNREGA with regard to asset creation and employment generation especially for women in rural areas in the last five years. Interestingly, about seventy percent of the expenditure of the total outlay has been on wages which has increased the employment opportunities but the link with asset creation differs significantly across states. The study found evidences of significant employment generation for women in most states but in some states which need improvement. The constraints in implementation, both technical and administrative were found to be responsible for this variation in women employment & asset creation. Keywords: MGNREGA, women, employment generation, asset creation