Public employment programmes are now recognized as essential components of any development strategy. India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) that ensures 100 days of employment to the rural poor across the country is an example of the importance of such programmes for the agenda of inclusive growth.
However, despite the political and economic importance NREGA has generated, there are lack of studies on the working of public employment programmes. It was so till the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) decided to include it as part of its survey of consumption expenditure since 2005-06. The most recent report on this—based on the 63rd round (2006-07)—has been released recently. It is also the first evaluation of public employment programmes since NREGA was enacted.
It is important here to mention two important caveats. First, the survey collected information on public employment programmes, which also included programmes other than NREGA. Since NREGA was applicable in only 200 districts at that time, the remaining districts were covered by other employment generation programmes. It can, therefore, not be treated as an evaluation of NREGA until the unit-level records are made available by NSSO. Moreover, since this was the first year of the implementation of NREGA, there is all the more reason not to use these estimates as an indicator of its working.
Secondly, unlike previous evaluations of employment generation programmes that are based on secondary data made available by the ministry of rural development, this analysis is based on information collected by actual workers. Needless to say, this is not only more reliable than ministry statistics, it also gives an idea of the actual reach of the programmes compared with official claims.
Also Read Himanshu’s earlier columns
Despite these caveats, one cannot avoid the inevitable comparison of estimates generated by NSSO with those that have been put together by the ministry of rural development. For any such comparison, I have relied on the much cited work by Jean Dreze and Christian Oldiges, which looked at statistics from the ministry of rural development regarding implementation of NREGA in 2006-07 (available at www.righttofoodindia.org).
Since the reference year is the same in both the studies, it is worthwhile to compare the two estimates. The NSSO estimates reported here are taken from the NSSO report No. 527 on consumption expenditure in 2006-07. The estimates of NREGA, based on the ministry of rural development data, is taken from Dreze and Oldiges.
According to NSSO, person days of employment generated under public employment programmes increased from 37 crore persondays in 2005-06 to 52 crore persondays in 2006-07. However, this increase was not equally shared by males and females, with male persondays employment generated increasing by 12 crore persondays, compared with only three crore additional female persondays of employment generated.