The digging-holes myth

The view of MGNREGA as a makeshift work programme is far off the mark.

Written by Jean Dreze | Published on:July 1, 2015 2:56 am 

Few social programmes in India are more resented by the corporate sector than the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). This is easy to understand, considering that one of the primary aims of the MGNREGA is to empower workers and reduce their dependence on private employers. Naturally, employers see this as a threat to the availability of cheap and docile labour. This resentment tends to generate a steady stream of criticism. Going by these reports, one would think that public works initiated under the MGNREGA are wholly useless. As a recent editorial put it, “…in most places across the country, this [MGNREGA] meant digging up trenches for no purpose whatsoever and then filling them up”. No evidence was provided for this sweeping statement. During the last few years, I have seen hundreds of MGNREGA works, and I do not remember a single case that resembled digging trenches and filling them up. Sure, I have seen some useless MGNREGA works (like a pond being built at the top of a hill in Sonbhadra district, Uttar Pradesh), but I have also seen many useful ones. Given the lack of careful studies on the productive value of MGNREGA works, the larger picture is not very clear. But some recent studies suggest that the view of MGNREGA as a makeshift work programme is far off the mark. Among them is a pioneering study by Sudha Narayanan and her colleagues at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, who examined 4,100 MGNREGA assets scattered over 100 villages of Maharashtra. Among the sample works, 87 per cent were functional and 75 per cent contributed directly or indirectly to better agriculture. An overwhelming majority (90 per cent) of the users of these MGNREGA works considered them “very useful” or “somewhat useful”. As the principal author notes, MGNREGA workers in Maharashtra have “replaced scrublands with forests, built earthen structures for impounding water and preventing soil erosion, cleared lands and levelled them to make them cultivable”, among other activities (available at arcg.is/1QYdt8y). This is hardly “playing with mud”, to quote another colourful description of MGNREGA work from the mainstream media. While the Maharashtra study focuses mainly on people’s perceptions, another recent study (by Anjor Bhaskar and Pankaj Yadav at the Institute for Human Development) looks at the objective measures of economic returns on MGNREGA works in Jharkhand. This study inspected nearly 1,000 randomly selected dug wells constructed under the MGNREGA in the last few years. Interestingly, the proportion of completed wells in the sample (70 to 80 per cent depending on whether one insists on the construction of a parapet) was not too different from official - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-digging-holes-myth-2/#sthash.1efWFcuX.dpuf