Rural Development and MGNREGA: Acts, Schemes and Wages

The correct answer is D, 100 days. Section 3 of the Act obliges the State Government to provide at least one hundred days of unskilled manual wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer for such work, and the guarantee belongs to the household, not to each member. A is wrong because 120 days is not the statutory figure, although the Central Government can allow extra days in areas hit by drought or natural calamity. B is wrong because 150 days has been proposed in debates on amending the Act but has never been the guarantee. C is wrong because 180 days would be half the year and no employment guarantee programme in the country promises that. Remember the three figures together: 100 days of work, 15 days to provide it or pay an allowance, and work within 5 kilometres of the village.

The correct answer is B, 2 February 2006, when the Act came into force in 200 of the poorest districts of the country, the first launch taking place at Bandlapalli in the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. A is wrong because the Act was passed by Parliament in 2005 and notified in September of that year, but it was brought into operation only in February 2006. C is wrong because 1 April 2008 is the date from which the Act covered all the rural districts of India, after an intermediate extension to 130 more districts in 2007-08. D is wrong because 2 October 2009, Gandhi Jayanti, is the date on which the Act was renamed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. All four dates appear in the options of such questions, so learn the sequence rather than a single date.

The correct answer is C, 2 October 2009. The Act was renamed on Gandhi Jayanti in 2009, and from then it has been known as MGNREGA, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. A is wrong because 2 February 2006 is the date the original Act came into force in the first 200 districts. B is wrong because no step of the scheme is dated 15 August 2008; the expansion to the whole of rural India took effect from 1 April 2008, the start of a financial year. D is wrong because 2 October 2014 is the day the Swachh Bharat Mission was launched, and the Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana was launched in the same month, on 11 October 2014. Keep the two Gandhi Jayanti dates apart: 2009 for the MGNREGA renaming and 2014 for Swachh Bharat.

The correct answer is B, 15 days. If employment is not provided within fifteen days of the application, or of the date from which work is sought, whichever is later, the applicant becomes entitled to an unemployment allowance, which the State Government pays from its own funds. This liability is what turns the scheme into a legal guarantee. A is wrong because seven days is not the statutory period, although panchayats are expected to act as quickly as possible. C is wrong because thirty days would defeat the purpose, since the demand for work usually arises in the lean season when a family cannot wait a month. D is wrong for the same reason. Note the symmetry that examiners test: fifteen days to give the work, and fifteen days from the closure of the muster roll to pay the wages.

The correct answer is B, 5 kilometres. The Act requires that work be provided ordinarily within five kilometres of the village of the applicant, and if the worksite is farther away, the worker is paid an extra ten per cent of the wage rate to meet the cost of travel and living. A is wrong because two kilometres is too narrow a radius to find works for all applicants and is not in the Act. C is wrong because ten kilometres is a distractor built from the ten per cent extra wage, a favourite trick of paper setters. D is wrong because leaving distance open would make the guarantee useless for a labourer with no transport. Along with the distance rule, remember the worksite facilities: drinking water, shade, a first aid box, and a creche where five or more children below the age of six are present.

The correct answer is B, one third. Priority has to be given to women in such a way that at least one third of the beneficiaries are women who have registered and asked for work, and the Act also requires equal wages for women and men for the same work. In practice the share of women in person days has usually been well above this floor. A is wrong because one fourth is the figure some older employment programmes used, not MGNREGA. C is wrong because one half is not a statutory requirement, although many States report higher participation by women than by men. D is wrong because two thirds has never been prescribed. Note that the reservation of one third for women in panchayats comes from the 73rd Amendment, a different provision that is often mixed up with this one.

The correct answer is C, Section 17, which makes the Gram Sabha responsible for monitoring the execution of works within the panchayat and for conducting a regular social audit of all the projects taken up under the scheme, with every record open to public inspection. A is wrong because Section 3 contains the guarantee itself, the hundred days of employment to every rural household that demands work. B is wrong because Section 6 empowers the Central Government to notify the wage rate, which is why MGNREGA wages are not always the same as the State minimum agricultural wage. D is wrong because Section 27 allows the Centre to give directions to a State and even to stop the release of funds where the Act is not implemented properly. Section 17 and the Gram Sabha make one of the most repeated pairs from this topic.

The correct answer is C, 60:40. At least sixty per cent of the cost of the works must go on wages and not more than forty per cent on material, so that the scheme remains an employment programme rather than a construction programme. The Act also bans contractors and the use of machinery that would displace labour. A is wrong because reversing the ratio would turn the scheme into a material heavy public works programme with little employment. B is wrong because fifty-fifty is not prescribed anywhere in the Act or its schedules. D is wrong because seventy-five is the Centre's share of the material cost in the funding pattern, a different number that the options deliberately mix in. Keep the two apart: 60:40 for wages to material, and 100 and 75 per cent for the Centre's share of wage and material cost.

The correct answer is B, 2000. The Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana was launched on 25 December 2000 to connect unconnected habitations with all weather roads, generally those with a population above five hundred in the plains and above two hundred and fifty in hill, tribal and desert areas, and it later added the upgradation of existing rural roads in further phases. A is wrong because 1996 is not associated with any rural roads programme of this kind. C is wrong because 2005 is the year of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and of the National Rural Health Mission. D is wrong because 2014 belongs to the Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana and the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana. Pair each scheme with its purpose: roads, houses, livelihoods and skills are four separate programmes.

The correct answer is A, DAY-NRLM, the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana National Rural Livelihoods Mission, launched in 2011 as Aajeevika in place of the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana. It organises poor rural women into self help groups, federates them at the village and block level, and supports them with a revolving fund, a community investment fund and interest subvention on bank loans. B is wrong because PMAY-Gramin provides pucca houses with basic amenities to the rural homeless and to households living in kutcha houses. C is wrong because DDU-GKY gives placement linked skill training to rural youth. D is wrong because the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission develops clusters of villages with urban amenities. One mission for groups, one for houses, one for skills and one for clusters.

The correct answer is B, the Community Development Programme, started in 1952 as the first integrated attempt at rural development, followed by the National Extension Service in 1953. Its weaknesses led to the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee of 1957, whose recommendation of democratic decentralisation gave India panchayati raj. A is wrong because the Integrated Rural Development Programme came at the end of the 1970s and aimed at self employment for families below the poverty line. C is wrong because the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana of 1989 was formed by merging the National Rural Employment Programme of 1980 and the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme of 1983. D is wrong because the Employment Assurance Scheme began in 1993 for the agricultural lean season in backward blocks. The chain to remember runs 1952, 1957, 1980, 1983, 1989, 1993, 2001 and then MGNREGA in 2005.