Right to Work? : Assessing India's Employment Guarantee Scheme in Bihar

India's ambitious National Rural Employment Guarantee Act creates a justiciable 'right to work' by promising up to 100 days of employment per year to all rural households whose adult members want unskilled manual work on public works projects at the stipulated minimum wage. Are the conditions stipulated by the Act met in practice, under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)? What impact on poverty do the earnings from the scheme have? Does the scheme meet its potential? How can it do better? Right to Work? Assessing India's Employment Guarantee Scheme in Bihar studies the MGNREGS's impact across India, then focuses on Bihar, the country's third largest and one of its poorest states. It shows that although the scheme has the potential to substantially reduce poverty through extra earnings for poor families, that potential is not realized in practice. Workers are not getting all the work they want, nor are they getting the full wages due. The intended recipients' awareness of how to obtain work is low. In a controlled experiment, a specially designed fictional movie was used to show how knowledge of rights and processes can be enhanced. Although the movie effectively raised awareness and improved public perceptions of the scheme, it had little effect on actions such as seeking employment when needed. Supplyside constraints in responding to demand for work must also be addressed. A number of specific constraints to work provision are identified, including poor implementation capacity, weak financial management, and inadequate monitoring systems. Addressing these constraints would allow this major antipoverty program to come much closer to reaching its potential.

'What makes this study especially important and topical is that employment is, today, a major concern across the world....India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme [MGNREGS] is the largest state-run employment-generation scheme in the world. This book is the most comprehensive study of this scheme. It is natural to expect it to find a large readership with or without my urging, but let me, nevertheless, ... put my urging on record.' --Kaushik Basu, Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, The World Bank (from the Foreword)

'MGNREGS is the largest public works program anywhere in the world. So a reasonably rigorous evaluation of its performance in one of the poorest states in India, as the authors attempt here, will be extremely valuable for all developing countries....I am sure this work will be widely cited.' --Pranab Bardhan, Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of California, Berkeley

'What makes this study especially important and topical is that employment is, today, a major concern across the world....India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme [MGNREGS] is the largest state-run employment-generation scheme in the world. This book is the most comprehensive study of this scheme. It is natural to expect it to find a large readership with or without my urging, but let me, nevertheless, ... put my urging on record.' --Kaushik Basu, Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, The World Bank (from the Foreword)