New Delhi: MGNREGA played a "very significant" role in helping people in rural areas cope with the pandemic, a top ministry official has said, adding that the government created more work days under the scheme during that time.
A total of 260 crore person days were created in 2019 whereas this number rose to 390 crore person days in 2021, Nagendra Nath Sinha, Secretary at the Ministry of Rural Development, said on Friday while addressing a session on 'Women, Ordeal and Opportunity through the Pandemic'. MGNREGA, the government’s flagship rural job guarantee scheme, guarantees 100 days of work a year to every rural household. "MGNREGA played a very significant role in addressing the needs of the rural communities in coping with the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic," Sinha said.
According to one expert, MGNREGA has the potential to shape women's economic status in society and can even influence gender norms.
"The policy itself can directly shape women's economic status, and can even shape some of the "restrictive gender norms" preventing women from entering the labour workforce," said Charity Troyer Moore, Director for South Asia Economics Research at Yale University's Macmillan Centre. She added, "Men really in this (rural) setting, perceive a very strong social stigma on them when their wives work. There's a perception that if my wife works outside of the home then I'm sending a signal to my whole community that I'm a poor provider."
On Female labour force participation, Rohini Pande, Director, Economic Growth Centre at Yale University, said the participation fell from "an average of around one in three women working to basically roughly one in five women working and this was true at the point when we entered the pandemic." Meanwhile, the data from the MGNREGA website shows work provided to households in June stood at 27.2 million compared with 26.1 million in May, an increase of 4.2% while the person-days work generated under the scheme last month was 412 million, a dip of 5.5% compared with 435 million in May.—IANS