Puja Dutta

Does India's employment guarantee scheme guarantee employment ?

In 2005 India introduced an ambitious national anti-poverty program, now called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The program offers up to 100 days of unskilled manual labor per year on public works projects for any rural household member who wants such work at the stipulated minimum wage rate. The aim is to dramatically reduce poverty by providing extra earnings for poor families, as well as empowerment and insurance. If the program worked in practice the way it is designed, then anyone who wanted work on the scheme would get it. However, analysis of data from Indias National Sample Survey for 2009/10 reveals considerable un-met demand for work in all states. The authors confirm expectations that poorer families tend to have more demand for work on the scheme, and that (despite the un-met demand) the self-targeting mechanism allows it to reach relatively poor families and backward castes. The extent of the un-met demand is greater in the poorest states -- ironically where the scheme is needed most. Labor-market responses to the scheme are likely to be weak. The scheme is attracting poor women into the workforce, although the local-level rationing processes favor men.

Testing information constraints on India's largest antipoverty program

This brief summarizes the updates from the 2013 paper entitled, Testing information constraints on Indias largest antipoverty program, conducted between between 2009 and 2010 in India. The study observed how public knowledge about Indias ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of Indias poorest states, Bihar, where participation is also unusually low. Is the solution simply to tell people their rights? Or does their lack of knowledge reflect deeper problems of poor peoples agency and an unresponsive supply side? This paper reports on an information campaign that was designed and implemented in the form of an entertaining movie to inform people of their rights under the scheme. In randomly-assigned villages, the movie brought significant gains in knowledge and more positive perceptions about the impact of the scheme. But objectively measured employment showed no gain on average, suggesting that the movie created a groupthink, changing social perceptions about the scheme but not individual efficacy in accessing it. The paper concludes that awareness generation needs to go hand-in-hand with supply-side changes.