Effectiveness of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Program (MGNREGP) to Check Migration Among Rural Households

An important objective of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (MGNREGP) is to curb rural out-migration. This paper on the basis of a micro-level field investigation wants to investigate the effectiveness of this programme to reduce the intensity of migration of the rural poor households to urban areas. The survey area is a mono-cropping area but job in the private non-farm employment in the locality is available moderately. Besides that, the geographical distance between the surveyed villages and the nearby urban or semi-urban areas is small which indicates very low cost of migration of the daily migrant. Incidentally, all the migrants in our sample villages are daily migrants. The local farm, average private non-farm wage and the average wage rate in the nearby urban informal sector is more than MGNREGP piece-rate. Hence seeking employment here through MGNREGP is not exogenous but endogenous in nature. In this background, it is proved that ‘motivation’ is a factor which influences the local MGNREGP job card holders to secure more person-days of employment through MGNREGP and the households who could secure more person-days of employment through MGNREGP are less prone to migrate from their native village