Analyzing Development Schemes Through a Gender Lens: The Case of MGREGS

When a government launches a large-scale rural employment scheme, the key question from a gender and development perspective is not just how many women are enrolled – but whether the scheme genuinely addresses the structural barriers that keep women economically marginalized. India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is one of the most studied cases in this regard. Designed as a universal employment guarantee, it carries within it a set of gender-specific provisions that make it stand apart from most public works programs. But do those provisions translate into real empowerment on the ground? A closer look reveals both notable gains and persistent limitations.

Understanding MGNREGS 🔗

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was passed on 25 August 2005, and the scheme was first implemented in 200 districts from February 2006, later expanding across the country by April 2008. At its core, MGNREGS is a Central Government-sponsored wage employment scheme aimed at providing livelihood security to poor and rural households. It operates on a demand-driven model: funds are allocated based on how much work is requested, not predetermined supply.

The scheme guarantees 100 days of paid unskilled manual work per year to any rural household whose adult members are willing to do such work. Its stated objectives go beyond just employment – they include reducing urban migration, creating productive rural assets, and directly empowering rural women and marginalized communities. The Ministry of Rural Development oversees its implementation, supported by professional monitoring and assessment committees at both state and national levels.

What distinguishes MGNREGS from a purely economic intervention is that it was conceived as a gender-sensitive scheme, with its design features reflecting an intention to make women active participants in the development process. The scale is significant: MGNREGS guarantees 100 days of wage labor each year to nearly 600 million people living in rural areas, making it one of the largest public employment programs in the world.

Gender-specific provisions in MGNREGS 🔗

The Act is notable for embedding several gender-sensitive design features directly into its legal framework, rather than leaving them to policy discretion. These provisions address women not just as workers, but as caregivers at different life stages.

One-third reservation for women 🔗

MGNREGS is described by the Ministry of Rural Development as a gender-positive programme that promotes participation of women through wage parity with men, separate schedule of rates of wages for women, and facilities for crèche and child care services at worksites. Central to this is the legal mandate that at least one-third of all beneficiaries must be women. In practice, this floor has been consistently exceeded – in many states, women constitute over 50% of the total workforce under MGNREGS, transforming rural employment patterns.

Equal wages 🔗

The Act explicitly mandates that equal wages be paid to men and women workers and that the provisions of the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 be complied with. This is significant in a rural labor market where gender-discriminatory wages have historically been the norm. By establishing legal parity, MGNREGS has contributed to narrowing the gender wage gap in the rural informal sector, with women gaining some realization of equal wages, carrying long-term implications for correcting gender-skewed wage structures.

Proximity of work and childcare facilities 🔗

Two other provisions directly tackle mobility and care constraints. First, the scheme requires that work be provided within five kilometers of a worker’s residence, eliminating the need for long commutes – a critical barrier for women given mobility restrictions rooted in gender norms. Second, the scheme provides childcare facilities on worksites and ensures work is close to women’s homes, allowing them to work with greater ease and safety. Worksites with more than five children under six years are required to provide on-site crèche facilities.

Recognition of single women as households 🔗

A lesser-discussed but important provision is that the scheme recognizes single women as a household, which has been a significant relief for widows and other single women who would otherwise struggle to access benefits under household-based eligibility criteria.

Flexible working hours and life-cycle sensitivity 🔗

The scheme also accommodates gender-specific life-cycle needs: design features cater to women at different stages of their life-cycle at the workplace, supporting them through physically lighter tasks and breaks during pregnancy, and providing child-carer roles for older women. Payment through individual bank accounts – part of broader digital financial inclusion efforts – was intended to give women direct control over their earnings.

Impact of MGNREGS on women’s empowerment 🔗

Research on MGNREGS consistently finds measurable gains in women’s economic and social position, even as the picture remains complex and uneven.

Economic independence and income control 🔗

For many rural women, MGNREGS provided their first opportunity to earn a regular cash income. The additional income from MGNREGA increased women’s social status within their family circles, and crucially, wage payment through individual bank accounts gradually changed women’s relationship with money. Research showed that women initially withdrew all wages at once, but over time began withdrawing as needed and started saving – including in fixed deposit schemes – giving them a degree of financial autonomy that was previously absent. When MGNREGS was introduced, wages were paid into one household account, usually controlled by male family members – shifting to individual accounts was therefore not just an administrative change but a meaningful shift in power dynamics.

A J-PAL study in Madhya Pradesh found that providing women with their own bank accounts combined with training and direct deposits changed gender norms: women worked outside the home more, had greater financial agency, and were more likely to approve of women working. This illustrates how the financial architecture of MGNREGS, when implemented well, can generate normative change beyond just income transfer.

Intra-household dynamics and decision-making 🔗

Some of the more compelling findings come from research on how MGNREGS affects women’s bargaining power within the household. A study examining cross-sectional data across five Indian states found strong positive effects of MGNREGS implementation on female decision-making power related to patterns of nutritious food consumption, children’s education, and female labor supply. The study argued that these effects were largely driven by changes in women’s relative economic endowments – when women control income, household priorities shift.

Research analyzing MGNREGA’s impact outlines three key dimensions of empowerment it can produce: income-consumption effects, where increased earnings expand women’s ability to choose their consumption basket; intra-household effects, where access to paid work widens women’s bargaining power; and the enhancement of choice and capability. However, the same research found that women’s control over household resources was not guaranteed just by participation – it was higher specifically during periods of active MGNREGA work, suggesting that the empowerment effect is closely tied to sustained engagement with the scheme.

Social and political empowerment 🔗

Beyond household dynamics, MGNREGS has contributed to broader social gains. Women’s political consciousness and active participation in local self-government and governance affairs increased since the scheme’s inception, as their enhanced social capital made them more visible public actors. The scheme also reduced distress migration by providing local employment opportunities, which was particularly significant for women who were often left behind in rural areas when male family members migrated for work. In rural areas, the female Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) increased to 30.5% in 2022-23 from 18.2% in 2017-18 – a trend in which MGNREGS played a contributing role.

Participation rates have also been impressive. The proportion of women person-days in the total reached 59.25% in 2023-24, with southern states like Kerala (89%), Tamil Nadu (86%), and Puducherry (87.16%) recording women’s participation rates above 70%.

Challenges faced by women in MGNREGS 🔗

Despite these gains, a gender lens analysis of MGNREGS reveals that progressive design provisions do not automatically translate into equitable outcomes. Several structural and implementation challenges persist.

The double burden of paid and unpaid work 🔗

Perhaps the most fundamental challenge is one that MGNREGS cannot resolve on its own: women who participate in the scheme do not reduce their unpaid domestic workload. They take on paid work in addition to their existing responsibilities as caregivers, housekeepers, and community workers. This is what gender scholars call the double burden – and MGNREGS, by creating employment without redistributing care work, risks intensifying it. The overall implementation of MGNREGA falls far short of being gender-sensitive or contributing meaningfully to women’s empowerment, as women work only when they have to, and those who can afford to often drop out – frequently because of the lack of childcare and infrastructure.

Research confirms that the dual role of women as both mothers and wage workers causes them physical and mental strain. The scheme was not conceived as an exclusive women’s empowerment programme, and its failure to address the care economy limits how transformative it can ultimately be.

Gendered work tasks and task-based payment 🔗

The nature of work itself is deeply gendered at MGNREGS worksites. Men typically do the digging work, while women are responsible for lifting and moving soil – a division that mirrors domestic gender hierarchies rather than challenging them. The adherence to group and task-based payment systems means that women, who are generally assigned less physically intensive (and hence less remunerated) tasks, often end up earning less despite the equal-wage mandate. Pregnant, lactating, and elderly women are the most disadvantaged under this system.

Gaps in childcare and infrastructure 🔗

While crèche facilities are legally mandated, implementation with inadequate facilities across the nation has resulted in gender insensitivity toward the mandatory provisions of the Act. Crèches are often absent or poorly maintained. Infrastructure gaps – lack of water, electricity, and sanitation at worksites – disproportionately affect women, for whom safe working conditions are a prerequisite for sustained participation.

Exclusion from decision-making 🔗

The Act mandates women’s representation in the Gram Sabha and monitoring committees, but this provision is scarcely implemented in practice. Women’s participation in community-level decision-making processes for the selection of the type and location of works is rarely implemented, and gendered norms around mobility and voice have either kept women out of planning processes entirely or rendered them silent spectators. State and central employment guarantee councils are largely inactive, further limiting any formal space for women’s voice.

Regional disparities and socio-cultural norms 🔗

Participation rates vary dramatically by geography. While southern states show women constituting nearly 90% of MGNREGS workers, women’s participation hovers around 40% or below in northern states like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Deep-rooted norms around women’s mobility, the absence of safe transportation, concerns about worksite harassment, and resistance from male household members all constrain participation – and no amount of legal mandate can fully substitute for the sustained social change needed to address them. At the start of one study in Madhya Pradesh, the majority of married women in surveyed villages stated that their husband had the most say in whether they worked – a stark reminder of how economic policy intersects with patriarchal household authority.

Wage adequacy and employment duration 🔗

The scheme is also limited by its 100-day ceiling. For the remainder of the year, women workers must continuously seek alternative income sources. This episodic nature of employment undermines long-term economic security. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Rural Development and Panchayati Raj has recommended increasing the guaranteed days of work to 150 and linking wages to the inflation index – reforms that remain pending. Notably, a new legislation – the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act – is positioned to replace MGNREGS and proposes increasing the statutory guarantee from 100 to 125 days, with strengthened provisions for women-headed households and one-third representation of women in employment guarantee councils.

What a gender lens reveals 🔗

Analyzing MGNREGS through a gender lens exposes both its promise and its limits. The scheme’s design is among the most gender-sensitive in any large public employment program globally: it legally mandates inclusion, equal pay, care support, and women’s representation. Yet its implementation has been inconsistent, and its design does not challenge the deeper structures – unpaid care work, mobility constraints, intra-household power imbalances – that define women’s participation in development.

The critical insight from gender and development scholarship is this: including women in a program is not the same as designing a program around women’s realities. MGNREGS does the former effectively, but falls short of the latter. Genuine gender-transformative development requires that schemes not only open access to paid work, but also address the conditions – domestic labor redistribution, safe infrastructure, meaningful voice – that determine whether that access becomes lasting empowerment.

What do you think? MGNREGS mandates equal wages and reserves one-third of employment for women, yet gendered work division at worksites means women often earn less in practice – does formal legal equality in a scheme automatically translate into substantive gender equality in outcomes? And given that women’s participation in MGNREGS is significantly higher in southern states than in the north, what does this regional gap tell us about the relative weight of cultural norms versus policy design in shaping women’s access to development programs?

References

1. https://jmra.in/archive/volume/8/issue/1/article/15897
2. https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/impact-financial-control-womens-labor-supply-and-gender-norms-india
3. https://rural.nic.in/en/press-release/participation-rural-women-mgnregs
4. https://csr.education/gender-development/women-equity-india-policies-impact/
5. https://compass.rauias.com/current-affairs/women-in-mgnregs/
6. https://www.unicef-irc.org/article/1934-gendering-the-design-and-implementation-of-social-protection-programmes.html
7. https://plrajiasacademy.com/index.php/current-affairs-details/upsc/english/mgnregs-and-women-empowerment-social-issue
8. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2452292920300667
9. https://www.ilo.org/media/420981/download
10. https://www.business-standard.com/industry/news/vb-g-ram-g-scheme-framed-to-be-gender-inclusive-govt-126021001720_1.html