The government of India passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, in September 2005, which came into force in 200 selected districts of February 2,2006 and will be extended to the rest of the districts within five years of its notification. The Act provides enhancement of livelihood security, giving at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in every financial year to every household, whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Panchayats at districts, intermediate and village levels will be principal authorities for planning and implementation of the Act. The NREG Act 2005 can provide basis of a permanent social security system and even act as an instrument for planned and equitable rural development. It is hoped that this will be an instrument of major socio-economic benefit for rural India. Initially, the government identified 22 districts as backward in U.P. for implementation of NREGS but it has increased 17 more backward districts in U.P. and 130 districts in the country since April 1, 2007 for implementing this scheme however, we have selected four districts, namely, Barabanki, Raebareli, Sitapur and Unnao for our survey based study having modest objectives as stated below.
The principal thrust of the survey is to understand whether
There is general awareness about the scheme among the villages
The scheme is providing jobs to the applications without hassles
The beneficiaries and the village people appreciate the implementation of the scheme
The project has potential to create job opportunities in the area and
To make suggestions for effective implementation of NREGS to benefit the poor people living the in rural areas
The survey exercise was conducted by administering a structured questionnaire schedule on the beneficiaries of the scheme at the worksites in the 16 villages spread over four select districts on the basis of convenient sampling. We selected two Blocks from each district and two villages form each Block on random basis. The sample size at each village's worksite was 25. Thus, in each district 100 beneficiaries were interviewed making the total sample size of 400 beneficiaries.
A case study of select 16 villages of four districts of U.P. under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 as being implemented in four out of 22 identified most backward districts of Uttar Pradesh underscores the important role of the Panchayati Raj Institutions. The interviews and discussions with the beneficiaries during the worksite surveys in these villages reveal the ground realities of the implementation of the scheme. The scheme has provided relief and succurence to poor village people as reflected in the feedback received from the beneficiaries in our 400 interview schedules. These people are engaged in unskilled manual work of various kinds, like digging the tanks, laying brick roads, making kaccha roads, plantation, desilting of Nallahs and Cannals. In fact, it independence of the country. In our survey we found that the people by large are happy and hopeful of getting the job opportunities in their own villages. Now they don't appear to feel compelled to go to the city centers in search of jobs in distress. However, they want increase in wages and worksite facilities, which indeed is reasonable and genuinely warranted. But the Participation of women has not been found encouraging despite for the success of the scheme is regular and concerted efforts to create quality awareness about their entitlements at the Gram Sabha level by all the stakeholders in each district on massive scale. This measure can provide fillip to efficient and effective implementation and enable them to demand the work and their entitlements as enshrined in the NREGA (schedule II)
