ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the MGNREGA's work Profile, wage structure and the migration issues. Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has been implemented in India since 2006. The basic objective of the act is to ensure livelihood and food security by providing unskilled work to people through creation of sustainable assets. Among the households surveyed, priority under MGNREGA was given to rural connectivity, which shared around 40 percent of the total employment, followed by water conservation and water harvesting, which shared 17 percent of employment under MGNREGA. Work participation in MGNREGA reveals that the households belonging to scheduled castes were invariably over-represented compared to their share in total households, while participation of upper castes was less than their share in the population in all the selected districts. The majority of the households who returned back to work in MGNREGA pointed out that they were now better off compared to working earlier as migrant labourers.
