MNREGA has hiked wages, says Oxford study

A research by Oxford University has found that India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) programme has increased rates of real agricultural wages by 5.3 per cent across the country since its introduction in 2006.

The study, led by Oxford, also involved researchers from the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, a university release said.

Using monthly wage data from the Ministry of Agriculture from the period 2000-2011 for 249 districts across 19 Indian states, the researchers found that NREGA boosted the real daily agricultural wage rates by 5.3 per cent on average.

This suggests the NREGA public works programme benefits not only those directly employed by the scheme but all wage earners in the agricultural sector, the release added.

Dr Erlend Berg, from the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford, said: "The higher wage rates make the very poorest better off, while landowners and other rural employers face higher labour costs.

"However, this objection does not stop governments around the world from trying to impose minimum wages rates, another market intervention that aims to favour workers while increasing costs for employers".

He added: "The Oxford study shows that public works programmes provide governments with an additional mechanism that can influence wage rates in the rural unskilled labour market".

In the period 2008-2010, NREGA generated 3.3 days of employment per year for each rural inhabitant in the average district.

The analysis shows that each extra day of employment per capita per year raises wages by 1.6 per cent, implying that the programme boosted real daily wage rates by 5.3 per cent in the average district in the period.

The researchers argue that there are two possible ways in which a large-scale public employment programme like NREGA can influence market wages.

The first is that the extra competition for workers drives up the price of their services. The second is that the roads, dams and other infrastructure built under the scheme may increase rural productivity and therefore wages more generally.

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