Effectiveness of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme to Check Migration among the Rural Households

Abstract

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, investigates 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 nonfarm employment in the locality is available moderately. Besides that, the geographical distance between the surveyed villages and the nearby urban or semiurban areas is small which indicates very low cost of migration of the daily migrant. Incidentally, all the migrants in the 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 persondays of employment through MGNREGP and the households who could secure more persondays of employment through MGNREGP are less prone to migrate from their native village.