Women's voice and agency in choosing assets: A new study on MGNREGA in India

In 2005, India passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, “the Act”), a law guaranteeing all rural households 100 days of work at a minimum wage through the building of durable assets, which created one of the largest anti-poverty programs in the world. Now known as the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA (MGNREGA), a notable feature of the program is that it envisions a democratic, bottom-up process of choosing which durable assets would be built within a community. Toward this end, the Act gives citizens the right to participate in the process of identifying potential projects and delegates responsibility to village governments in selecting which assets to build.

Yet, in the long history of public works programs, there has been limited research on how assets created under such workfare programs are selected, or how to increase the role of women or other marginalized groups in the decision-making process. The Act provides a list of permissible works that span natural resource management, individual and community assets, common infrastructure for women’s groups, and rural infrastructure more broadly. Given the scale of the program, the assets selected at the village level have tremendous potential to enhance rural resilience to unexpected shocks and crises, especially those related to climate change. This is important, as extreme weather events on the Indian subcontinent are increasing, both in frequency and in the magnitude of their impacts on agricultural productivity, household livelihoods, assets and incomes, and health and nutrition. These events, as well as their impacts on incomes, often affect women more severely (Mason and Agan 2015; Kosec et al. forthcoming).

Understanding how to enhance women’s voice and agency within the process of selecting community assets is important for three major reasons. First, women and men may have different asset preferences (Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004). Recent time-use survey data from India find that women spend far more time on unpaid domestic and care work than men (eight times as much) (India, NSO 2019). Thus, women may place relatively more value on projects that reduce effort in collecting fuel and water, for example. If their voices are not included in the asset selection process, the village could miss out on a range of development projects that would improve overall productivity, resilience, and well-being. Second, where projects are built affects who benefits from them. Households that had MGNREGA assets built on their own land or that live near an asset cultivate more land, use more inputs (including their own labor), and have higher agricultural output (Gehrke 2015; Muralidharan et al. 2021). Ensuring that women influence asset placement is thus critical. Third, greater participation and inclusivity in the process of selecting community development projects can increase the perceived legitimacy and satisfaction with projects, as well as willingness to contribute toward their construction and maintenance (Olken 2010). Within MGNREGA, households that report playing a greater role in project selection also report greater satisfaction with the usefulness, quality, and maintenance of the projects (Ranaware et al. 2015).