Examining the evidence on the effectiveness of India’s rural employment guarantee act.

This working paper offers an overview of the existing evidence on India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which aims to provide 100 days of guaranteed paid employment in a year in the form of unskilled manual labour to interested adults. The results are also presented in a user-friendly heat map that shows the type of evidence available for each Indian state as well as at the national level. The existing evidence shows that there is a critical paucity of impact evaluation evidence, despite wide availability of data. Most evidence available is from a few states. There is little evidence available on governance, indirect economic effects and poverty alleviation.