NREGA in Andhra Pradesh: Seven Lessons from the Data

Abstract

In 2006, the government of India passed a law guaranteeing each and every rural household in the country one hundred days of work at a basic minimum wage. The law, known as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), in effect created India’s (and probably the world’s) largest anti-poverty program in terms of number of beneficiaries. According to official statistics, 45 million households participated in NREGA in fiscal year 2008-09. An innovative feature of the NREG Act is its provisions for transparency: the act itself stipulates that work records, or “muster rolls”, be made available to the public, and that local “social audits” be conducted on a regular basis (Right to Food, 2007). The state of Andhra Pradesh has taken this call for transparency once step further by making detailed micro-level data on NREGA participation in the state available to the public over the internet. To the author’s knowledge, there are few precedents among major poverty relief programs for this kind of public data dissemination. In this focus note, we highlight some specific lessons that may be learned by looking closely at this data. The lessons presented here are not intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the functioning of NREGA in Andhra Pradesh. For such an overview, readers are recommended to consult Anil Sharma’s excellent review of the program or the articles in the mainstream press by Jean Dreze and his coauthors. Rather, the lessons presented here are meant to complement such overviews by presenting key insights derived from quantitative analysis of the data.