Employment Generation among Women in NREGS: A Synthesis on the basis of Micro Level Field Investigation

Government of India has initiated the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) or N REGS in 2006 where the basic objective is to provide 100 full man-days of employment to each willing rural household. The adjoining act (NREG Act of 2005) that guarantees employment of every rural household for 100 days has different provisions to incentivize participation of women in the programme. The programme indeed has both direct and indirect aspects towards favoring the participation of women in order to fulfill a larger objective of women empowerment. Thus it becomes imperative to focus on the extent to which the programme is inclusive of women. Official data suggest that 47% of all NREGS workers are women. However, in this regard, there is substantial variation not only across states but also across different regions within a state. The present paper based on a primary survey made in Birbhum district of West Bengal, attempts to investigate whether expansion of NREGS has been able to help the female job-card holders to get employment through NREGS where we have considered ratio of female man days to total man days of a household as the outcome variable. It is observed that the heterogeneity in the value of the stated outcome variable is significantly caused by nature of works the female job card holders have to carry out under NREGS and family parameters faced by them which somehow emanate from socio-cultural factor(s) in general and binding in particular. Apart from this, although there is inevitability of the influence of total number of NREGS man- days received in the entire reference period by the household to which the female member(s) belongs, yet, there seems no one to one correspondence between the outcome variable and the same.