Social Protection Systems in India: Impact of Self-Help Groups on Access to and Employment Under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme

Policy makers increasingly emphasise the importance of setting up social protection systems to ensure coordination of intersectoral efforts. We contribute to the literature on social protection systems by examining how two of the largest social protection programmes in the world interact. Specifically, we assess the impact of participation in a scaled-up self-help group (SHG) program on Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) employment outcomes in Bihar, India. We use administrative data from India’s National Rural Livelihoods Mission about SHGs implemented under the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project and MGNREGS from 2013 to 2020 and merge those data with data from a randomised controlled trial of the rollout of SHGs in Bihar. We use an instrumental variable regression analysis to examine the impact of SHG membership on access to job cards and employment under MGNREGS. We find statistically significant effects indicating that an increase of 100 SHG members results in 26 additional MGNREGS job cards applied for, and 14 additional households that are provided MGNREGS employment. We find evidence for larger impacts for scheduled caste and scheduled tribe households, but no evidence for differences in impacts between men and women.