Description
Agriculture is the largest and most important sector of the Indian economy. It plays a crucial role in providing food to the nation, employment to the population, raw materials to the industry and surpluses for national economic development. With a decline in food grains production prices rise, wages increase, industrial growth slows down and exports suffer. The agricultural sector directly accounts for more than two- fifths of the gross domestic product (GDP). It is also responsible for the growth of industry, trade, transport, banking and business services, which, in turn, influence the growth of GDP. The Republic of Indian Parliament passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA 2005) which was rechristened as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) 2005 on 2nd October 2009. Under this Act, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is to be implemented towards partial fulfilment of a constitutional obligation under Article 41 of the Indian Constitution that provides a non-judiciable Right to Work to the citizens of the country and directs that “The state shall, within the limits of its economic capacity and development, make effective provision for securing the right to work in case of unemployment. The Act received the assent of the President of India on September 5, 2005 and was notified in the Gazette on September 7, 2005. It came into force in 200 select districts on February 2, 2006 as the first phase and in 2007 the second phase of its implementation managed to extend it to another 130 districts and then with affect from April 1, 2008 The Act has covered all the 625 districts of India. The act provides a guarantee of 100 days of wage employment in a financial year to a rural household whose adult members are willing to do manual and unskilled work. This step is expected to provide wage employment to the rural poor and would act as a safety net below which no household would be allowed to fall. MGNREGS has been designed based on the lessons learnt from the implementation of earlier wage employment programmes such as NREP, RLEGP, JRY, SGRY (Sampurna Gramin Rozgar Yojana) and JGSY (Jawahar Gram Smridhi Yojana). The MGNREGS is the most ambitious and well-structured wage employment programme of Government of India (GOI).
