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MOTIVATION
The study aims to thoroughly evaluate the impacts of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the largest public works project in the world. The NREGS project began in 2006, following the 2005 act that provided each rural household with a legal right to be employed up to 100 days per year at the state-level minimum wage rate. NREGS is demand-driven; all rural households are eligible for NREGS; and self-selection is the major mechanism to target the poor. NREGS projects are selected at the local level, and they provide equal wage rates to women for the same work as men, paying the individual workers directly.
IFPRI’s research results already suggest that the program is well-targeted in Andhra Pradesh and, while short-term effects are greater in terms of participants’ nutritional intake, in the medium-term, researchers see an increased accumulation of nonfinancial assets. Both short- and medium-term benefits seem to accrue more to participants in the scheduled castes and tribes, as well as to those who would otherwise rely on casual labor. This study, to be completed in 2015, is a collaborative effort of IFPRI—as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets, Cornell University, and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research—and was funded by the International Initiative on Impact Evaluation (3ie).
OUTCOMES
- The results of the analysis have been addressed in a blog on the Tata-Cornell Agriculture and Nutrition Initiative website.
- The India Environment Portal, which was initiated and is managed by the Centre for Science and Environment and promoted by the National Knowledge Commission of the government of India, posted the research results in a project note.
