Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and women empowerment: a case study
Student name: Ms Himani Sachdeva
Guide: Dr Nidhi Pande
Year of completion: 2013
Host Organisation: TERI University
Abstract: “When women and adolescent girls have equal rights and opportunities, their families,
communities and nations prosperâ€- Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, Director, UNFPA
Women need to be empowered in all walks of life. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural
Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which entitles rural households to 100 days of
casual employment on public works at the statutory minimum wage, contains special
provisions to ensure full participation of women. Using a field survey, this paper examines the
empowerment effects of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme
(MGNREGS) on rural women in a few villages of District Sonipat, Haryana. A similar sample
for Non-MGNREGA women workers doing comparable work in Delhi (urban area - where
MGNREGA is not available) is collected to find if MGNREGA women are better-off or
worse-off in comparison. It argues that women workers in MGNREGS have gained from the
scheme in many aspects through construction of certain indices that capture different aspects
of empowerment .This is primarily because of the paid employment opportunity, and benefits
have been realised through income-consumption effects, intra-household effects, and the
enhancement of choice and capability. Women have also gained to some extent in terms of
realisation of equal wages under the MGNREGS, with long-term implications for correcting
gender skewness and gender discriminatory wages prevalent in the rural labour market of
India. Despite the difficulties and hurdles for women, for the villages covered under the study,
the overall impact of MGNREGA on women comes out as positive. Some of the
implementation bottlenecks once rectified, the scheme can lead to enhanced results in its
empowerment objective. Some suggestions in this respect are made at the end.
