Traditional Institutions and Female Beneficiaries of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee in West Bengal

Abstract

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) ensures 100 days of employment in a year in unskilled manual labor intensive public work at statutory minimum wage for any adult from a household living in rural areas. One important feature is uniform wage across gender. Participation of women gets priority in the program. As per this act, women should constitute at least one-third of the total beneficiaries of the program. In Indian social fabric, women of scheduled caste (SC) community are least restrained by social norms compared to women of upper caste (UC) community and Muslim community. In general, the return from participation in MGNREGA will be highest for those women whose mobility and social interaction is least impeded by conservative social norms. Women hindered most by restrictive social norms may fetch maximum benefits from an intervention if that intervention expands knowledge base or challenges traditional norms of gender. It may be interpreted as non-monotonic effect of restrictedness across caste and religion. Using primary data from three districts of West Bengal, this chapter has tried to see whether there exists any non-monotonic effect of restrictedness on household’s ‘expenditure on consumption,’ ‘expenditure on temptation good,’ ‘expenditure on women’s health,’ and ‘expenditure on children’s education and health’ across social groups. In our study, we have chosen those UC women in the sample who are especially responsive to MGNREGA. If social restrictedness creates bottlenecks for knowledge, and participation of women in MGNREGA allowed UC women to challenge existing gender norms to enhance their agency, then why Muslim women, who most fettered by social norms, did not respond more to MGNREGA than SC women did. One explanation of our result is non-monotonic effect of social restrictions. Participation in MGNREGA has enhanced agency of those women whose agency was constrained due to restrictive social norms, but women subject to severe domination has too little agency to fulfill their goal.