History’s curse on MGNREGA
Live MintWhen it was launched in 2006, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was envisaged to boost rural economies by providing the rural poor with 100 days of guaranteed public employment and raising rural wages. The study, authored by Kartik Misra of the University of Massachusetts, shows far from addressing regional inequalities, MGNREGA’s effects have fallen victim to historical inequalities in agricultural land ownership. In areas where land is concentrated in the hands of relatively few large landowners such as districts central and eastern India, where the legacy of the colonial ‘zamindari’ system has persisted, rural wage growth was sluggish after MGNREGA’s launch. Misra also finds that the number of employment days created under MGNREGA in ‘zamindari’ districts has been lower than that in non-landlord districts of British India.