The Role and Impact of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act - Dissertation Example

Ever since the inception of the development concept, development as a process has gone through various stages from economic development to equitable growth, to meet the basic needs of people, to the participatory approach of development, and to the most recent sustainable development (Watts 1993). The research work carried out during the late 1980s and 1990s shows that the focus only on food security needed to be broaden-up. People may choose to go hungry to preserve their assets and future livelihoods (Maxwell and smith 1992).

The evolution of the concepts and issues related to household food and nutritional security led to the development of the concept of household livelihood security. This paper tells that the household livelihood security model allows for a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the relationships between the political economy of poverty, malnutrition, and dynamic and complex strategies that the poor use to negotiate survival. The model places particular emphasis on household actions, perceptions, and choices.

People are constantly being required to balance food procurement against the satisfaction of other basic material and non-material needs (Maxwell and Frankenberger 1992). India in its preamble of the constitution ensures all the citizens to social - economic and political justice. After the Independence government of India refine its policy and program from time to time to achieve above mention objectives but still India has the world’s largest number of poor people living in a single country.

According to GOI, 2002 around 260 million people are living below the poverty line. The rural area yields a poverty ratio of 28.3 percent, 25.7 percent in urban areas, and 27.5 percent for the country as a whole (Government of India 2008) Therefore, considering poverty alleviation as a border objective, The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 2005, is one of the most constructive efforts by the government of India to provide livelihood security to rural people by providing statutory entitlement of 100 days wage-employment in a financial year to the household.

This act aims to (A) increase the purchasing power of the rural people, (B) attempt to bridge the gap between rich and poor of the country, (C) primarily provide work to people living below the poverty line in rural India, and (D) 50% of the total labor must be women.