Hundred Days, Shumdred Days

The following blog post is based off of research conducted by Doug Johnson, Ajay Tannirkulam, Caroline Laroche, Deepak Saraswat and others at CMF on NREGA in Andhra Pradesh. The full research can be found here, here, and here.



According to the text of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, all rural households throughout the country are guaranteed at least 100 days of work per year. From numerous social audits of the scheme, we know that administrators often fall short of providing the full 100 days to those households seeking work. But what about those households which actually manage to receive 100 days of work in a year, are they turned away if they try to work one more day? Not in AP it seems. As the graph below shows, administrators do not seem particularly concerned with the 100 day mark at all: the number of households which worked 101 days in fiscal year 2007-08 is just about the same as the number of households which worked 100 days that year. In fact, there is almost no noticeable decline at the 100 days mark.