How the rural employment guarantee scheme is a double-edged sword for women

 The year Chanchal Kumari was born was 2002, the year of drought in Rajasthan. For two years, the country suffered from severe water shortages. There was no water to drink, no crops to plant, and cattle died. His family was on the brink of starvation. His father Raju Singh, a contract labourer, had to leave the city to find work outside the state. With livelihoods collapsing everywhere, demand for job creation programs has increased. Chan-chal's family also joined the movement. Chanchal is from the Rajamand region of southern Rajasthan, with a history of grassroots-led social mobilization. The district led a campaign for information and labor rights. This latter campaign culminated in the 2005 enactment of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Security Act, or MGNREGA (formerly known as the National Rural Employment Security Act). MGNREGA, the largest employment security program in the world, is employment driven. Mahatma Gandhi Guarantee Act. Guarantee scheme introduced in Maharashtra after a drought in the 1970s. This year there was little rainfall in this area. "We cannot live without Nrega. It helps women support their families.

When IndiaSpend met Chanchal in July, he was overseeing the digging of trenches to store rainwater during the monsoons. Since last year, he has been working as a helmsman or MGNREGA field head. His four brothers work in the hospitality industry in the city of Gujarat. His job as a helmsman is to check an employee's presence in an app on their mobile phone and assign them daily tasks. About 80 laborers and 70 women were armed at the excavation site. Chanchal's appointment of partners is part of a recent innovation to bring more women to MGNREGA partners in states like Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, and place more women at the center of programs than men.

According to the Ministry of Rural Development, women will constitute 54.54% of the MGNREGA workforce in 2021-2022. But in the workplace, leadership positions have always been held by those who control the money and decision-making. At the other three IndiaSpend locations in the Udaipur and Rajsamand regions, almost all women in their 20s were trained and worked as partners. Digital literacy is a prerequisite for employment, and in rural India most women lack access to digital devices and technologies.

Rajasthan was the best performing state under MGNREGA and launched the City Job Guarantee earlier this year. In response to rising interest in post-pandemic job demand, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand have introduced wage employment schemes in the city.

Uttar Pradesh, on the other hand, had the lowest female participation rate in MGNREGA and last year trained its partners to be active stakeholders, not just in the workplace. It works: State data shows female participation rose from 33.59 percent in 2020-21 to 37.7 percent in 2022-23. Anecdotal evidence suggests that female partners also brought greater openness. This is the second in IndiaSpend's Women at Work 3.0 series, which looks at the post-Covid reality of women in India's workforce.

The first part here showed that the increase in female employment in 2020-21 could mean that women who dream of work and income could end up in low-paid and low-quality jobs. The next section examines how the digitization of jobs affects women.

MGNREGA: Trend Bucking
It is no secret that the employment rate of Indian women has declined. However, in contrast to this overall decline, the female employment rate under MGNREGA has steadily declined in this trend. This can be attributed in part to the program's initial commitment to hire women through a 33% reservation. From the beginning, women were significantly more active in MGNREGA than any other type of registration. Studies show that the proportion of women employed under MGNREGA is higher than the proportion of women employed in the labor market in all states. Consider, for example, rural Rajasthan, where women make up 46.5% of the labor force (aged 15 and above) in the Periodic Labor Force Survey 2020-21. During this period, 65.68% of women participated in MGNREGA. Similarly, rural women's labor force participation in India was 36.5% between July 2020 and June 2021, while under MGNREGA it was 53.19% during the same period.

 

Read more: https://scroll.in/article/1031636/how-the-rural-employment-guarantee-scheme-is-a-double-edged-sword-for-women