This article in Economic and Political Weekly evaluates the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS’) according to the following four criteria:
- The average number of days of household
- The percentage of households completing 100 days of employment
- The percentage of expenditure against total funds
- The percentage of work completed
The article starts with a brief description of NREGS- the purpose for, which the scheme was implemented and how it would help in reduction of poverty. However with the beginning of the scheme till now no assessment has been made. In this backdrop the authors raise three vital questions:
- How much benefit has accrued from this programme to eligible workers
- Have these benefits persisted over time
- How much, and what type of work has been completed using NREGS labour and how useful it has been
The paper then goes on to elaborate on how these three questions are addressed. In the next section the paper provides the results by making use of the government statistics. In the final section of the paper it is been stated that the performance across the four criteria has been disappointing and the percentage of households completing 100 days of employment has deteriorated over a period of time. However there has been growing sense of entitlement among the deprived.
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