Employment availed by women in Andhra Pradesh under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme (MGNREGA) has declined over the past three years, according to a report which looks at the implementation of the scheme from April to December 2020. While the average number of person days (the total number of days that employment was provided for a worker) have typically been higher among women in the state compared to men, the share of women’s person days has dropped by about 3.7% compared to last year (from 60.05% in 2019 to 56.38% in 2020).
The report, published by LibTech India, a collective of engineers and social workers working on improving public service delivery, shows that the gap between the percentage of employment availed by men and women has steadily gone down over the past three years, while women have continued to avail more employment than men under the scheme each year. If the percentage of women’s participation in the scheme had remained the same as last year, women workers would have received an additional Rs 199.39 crore in wages, according to the report.
However, wages amounting to a total of Rs 5.16 crore is pending payment to workers in the state as of January 2 due to technical problems, the report said. The pending wages, related to around 40,000 transactions, are stuck due to problems at the bank level, the report said. While Vizianagaram district provided the most employment with 245.26 lakhs of person days in total (with an average of more than 60 days of work per worker), the district also had the least number of pending wages.
A total of 67 lakh families, or 1.22 crore workers, are registered in the state under MGNREGA. Compared to last year, the percentage share of employment provided to SC workers increased by nearly 2% (from 21.14% to 23.10%). On the other hand, the percentage share of employment of ST workers reduced by a small amount, from 11.37% to 11.08% (a decrease of 0.29%).
The pandemic year saw a huge spike in employment provided under the scheme in the state, a rise of 32% in person days compared to last year. A total of 6,28,349 new workers were added to the NREGA workforce in 2020. While the approved labour budget for the state is 25.25 crore person days, the number of person days generated for 2020-21, between April and December, was 22.19 crore days.
Despite the spike, only 8.62% of the households actively working under the scheme (4,02,733 out of 46,71,690 households) completed the 100 days of work guaranteed under the scheme. The average days of employment provided per registered household in the state was about 47 days, and the average daily wage rate per person was Rs 229.45, slightly higher than the national average of Rs 200.26.
Read: