The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and the Women Workers in the Rural Uttar Pradesh

The proponents of the MGNREG Act claimed that to some extent it redresses the vulnerabilities of the rural women by fixing a quota for them in the generated employment and an equality of wages with men. A glimpse on the participation of women in aggregate at the national level testifies the claims of the proponents; however its design failed to yield desired results in certain peculiar social and economic circumstances. Broadly two factors were found to be responsible for the poor participa-tion of women. Firstly the imperfections in the governance mechanism and secondly the role of social and cultural practices that hindered women from accessing the guarantee under the scheme. This socio-cultural aspect forms the core problem of the low employment of the women in the scheme. The analysis indicates that the unwillingness of the women is not the causative factor for their lesser participation, but the social and environmental factors contributes in suppressing their desire for earning wages outside their traditional roles. The paper ends with the finding that in the absence of any gender sensitive mechanism of implementation and against the challenges posed by the social and cultural circumstances, the fates of the women labourers depend on the expectation of an active role of the implementing authorities.