NREGA plays an important role as a safety net for rural poor in India. It is even more so during this moment of crises, as India braces for the economic impact from Covid-19 related disruption and lockdowns.

However we saw during the lockdown period in April-2020, that not only were migrant workers left to their own during the lockdown, even the rural poor lost a major source of livelihoods. NREGA work dipped slightly in March-2020 and saw an unprecendented crash in April-2020.

The figure below show the number of person days of employment generated under NREGA. The blue line show raw data ofr NREGA employment. Notice that there are wide seasonal variation in NREGA employment – it generally peaks in months of May-June and dips in October, November. These seasonal variation make it difficult to infer short-term fluctuations. To deal with this, we have also plotted seasonally adjusted series (red line) which removes these seasonal variation.

It can be clearly seen that NREGA employment took a huge dip in April-2020. This becomes even clearer when one compares employment for specific months across years. Figure below shows clearly that NREGA employment fell by a whooping 92% in April-2020 compared to April-2019.

It is really important for the government to make sure NREGA workers are compensated for the lost wages in April-2020. Adequate arrangements should also be made for workers to resume work in May-2020 along with proper guidelines and safety measures related to physical distancing etc. We will be tracking this closely.