Women outnumber men to attend work under MGNREGA in AP

Ongole (Prakasam District): The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) helped more women to get work when compared with men, for the time period from April 2022 to January 2023 in Andhra Pradesh.

LibTech India is a collective team of engineers, social workers, and social scientists working in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and other States for the last ten years. The team prepared an analysis report on the employment status in Andhra Pradesh with the data on MGNREGA from the government. According to the data, the MGNREGA is being implemented in 13,476 panchayatis in 661 mandals of 26 districts of Andhra Pradesh. About 96.89 lakh workers, who are registered in 56.62 lakh job cards, are active in the said time and received about 45.9 days of work on average to get Rs 210.19 as wage per day per person.

In the total 19.99 crore persondays generated under MGNREGA in Andhra Pradesh, about 60 per cent, 11.99 crore persondays were received by women. Workers from the SC community received 4.72 crore persondays, while the ST community received 1.97 crore persondays. It is Srikakulam district leading the districts generating the highest number of persondays with 1.583 crores followed by Vizianagaram with 1.506 crores and Prakasam with 1.449 crores in the second and third positions. Visakhapatnam district is able to provide only 12.2 lakh persondays and at the last position, while Guntur is second from the last generating only 26.4 lakh persondays to the workers.

It is observed in the data that year after year, the persondays are decreasing, along with the households participating in the works. The 19.99 crore persondays in 2022-23 (Up to January) is less than 8.7 per cent when compared to the same period in 2021-22 and is less than 12.2 per cent when compared with 2020-21. It is the SCs and STs that affected the trend in the persondays, and the SCs lost about 8.2 per cent of persondays while STs lost about 10.9 percent of days work, as women also lose 5.2 per cent of persondays.

One of the analysers, Chakradhar Buddha said that though Andhra Pradesh performed better when compared to the national level, the findings raise concerns about the implementation of MGNREGA in Andhra Pradesh. He said that it is necessary to address the issues of declining employment rates and gender-based disparities to ensure the programme's effective implementation.