Inclusive Development Experiences-II: Assets Creation and Multiplier Effects

Assets creation is incidental to the objective of employment generation, yet considering their complementarities in promoting livelihood security, the Act makes a fine balance between the twin goals of employment and assets creation. MGNREGA assets have filled critical infrastructural gaps in rural areas. It has promoted agriculture and allied activities and improved livelihood conditions of the agriculture-dependent rural population. Works pertaining to water conservation and harvesting, promotion of irrigation, including renovation of traditional water bodies, have proved hugely beneficial to Indian agriculture. Land development and irrigation works have created triple impacts on agriculture that is crop acreage increase, greater yield per acre/hectare and crop diversification. Livestock, fishery and horticulture-related assets have promoted income level of beneficiary households. A large number of small and marginal farmers, who constitute more than 80% of India’s farmers, have benefitted by the provision of land and irrigation on their farm land. Some of them have supplemented their increasingly decreasing farm income through MGNREGA wage work. The rural poor have gained by the regeneration of natural resources like land, water and forest, as they draw water, fodder and fuel from the common resources, which were depleting, and have been recharged because of the MGNREGA assets. Individual assets have created transformational impacts in some cases, but no less substantive otherwise also. It has provided opportunities to enhance their income levels, escape poverty and catapult them from the status of wage employment to self-employment.