CESS, Hyderabad
Online published on 2 March, 2012.
Increasing incidence of unemployment, especially among the weaker sections of the rural society was being witnessed for a long time. As such special programmes of wage employment for the unskilled labour were needed to address the emerging unemployment scenario in rural areas. Therefore, the NREGS was introduced as a remedy. In Andhra Pradesh, the NREGS was initially implemented in 13 districts in February, 2006 and later extended to the other districts of the State. This paper attempts to assess the performance of NREGS in Andhra Pradesh. For generating data through field survey, one district each was randomly selected from Rayalaseema region, north coastal Andhra, northern Telangana, and sourthern Telangana region. Four districts selected are Ananthapur, Vijayanagaram, Karimnagar and Mahaboobnagar. Mandals, in turn, were selected from the sample districts on the basis of their performance. In each of the selected mandals, five Gram Panchayats were randomly selected From the selected Gram Panchayats, 15 per cent of the beneficiary households and 10 per cent of the non-beneficiary households were selected as sample households. In nutshell, 600 beneficiary households and 400 non-beneficiary households were covered for the study. The analysis of the study spanned three broad domains of the scheme - namely. Planning, Implementation and Impact. The study found that the scheme ensured more benefits to the poorest of the poor. The study also offers a set of policy recommendations for effective implementation of the scheme to ensure inclusive growth in Andhra Pradesh.
