India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme as it is - Interpreting the Official Report

Using official data this paper evaluates India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) according to four criteria a) average number of days of employment per household, b) percentage of households completing 100 days of employment under NREGS, c) percentage of expenditure against total available funds, and d) percentage of work completed. Performance across all four criteria has been disappointing and, except for percentage of households completing 100 days of employment, has actually deteriorated over time. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the NREGS has not performed well. The paper makes a number of policy suggestions to improve the performance of the NREGS.