MGNREGA

From: IAS (Indian Administrative Service Aspirant's blog)

The objective of MGNREGA is to provide enhanced livelihood security to the households in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in financial year to any household whose adult members volunteers to unskilled manual work.

The Act came into force in 200 notified districts of the country with effect from 2nd February, 2006 and additional 130 districts were added from 2007-08. All the remaining districts of the country were brought in the ambit of the Act from 1st April, 2008. The MGNREGA is a demand-based program, hence no targets for employment generation are fixed. Thus, the requirement of fund and employment generation depend  on demand for work.

Approach to Twelfth Five Year Plan observed that technical soundness of design and quality of works undertaken in MGNREGA falls short of what is needed to ensure land productivity enhancement. There appear to be two critical areas in regard to MGNREGA, (i) technical capacity at the local level, and (ii) involvement of PRI representatives at every level of process needs to be addressed and resolved in the Twelfth Plan. Ministry of Rural Development has developed a comprehensive web based MIShttp://www.nrega.nic.in/ which places all data relating to financial and programme performance indicators in public domain. MIS places all critical data on the web and this data is software engineered, which has significant advantages in terms of transparency as it allows cross verification of records and generation of records on any parameter of the Act. This MIS has all the physical and financial performance details up to the district levels.