Today’s Hindu carries a piece by Jean Dreze and Siddhartha Lal where they narrate their field experiences in Rajasthan on a trip that was undertaken to assess the implementation of the NREGA. While there was a lot of debate about the policy behind the Act when it was introduced, not much attention has been focused on the implementation of the law – a trend that is sadly quite common in India. While the Dreze-Lal piece is not a systematic empirical study, and only describes the result of a two day stint in one district in Rajasthan, their mixed findings do give some sense of the problems being faced in implementing the law, while also focusing on its positive aspects.

For those interested in some more details about the issue, here is the Wikipedia entry on the NREGA; here is the link to the official website of the Union Ministry of Rural Development which provides details about the implementation of the NREGA; and here is a set of basic FAQs compiled by rediff.com.