IJSP is an International, Peer Reviewed/ Refereed, Indexed, Open Access, Online Journal of Arts and Social Sciences. Call for Paper: Vol 12 (02): 2025, Publication date: 31 July 2025 (Online), 15 August 2025 (Print), Last date of Submission : 15 June 2025

Administering MGNREGS and Bureaucratic pathologies : A Note

Vijay Kumar N Torgal

Affiliations:

Karnataka Administrative Service Officer (Retired). Karnataka, INDIA???????

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In India several poverty alleviation programmes for providing wage employment to rural people are in operation. These are part of rural development programmes, which the governments have initiated since the dawn of the community development, which was later changed to broad based rural development. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is one of the several wage employment schemes in operation in India, which are being implemented both by the Central and State Governments. The scheme provides secure livelihood to rural people which would reduce the migration of the rural labor, which is the main input for the agriculture sector. It is often felt that the schemes in operation are not being implemented in full complement and several reports of performance audit of these schemes are in place. The paper examines the bottlenecks, such as administrative organization, technical support, more emphasis on financial control and bureaucratic attitude etc., and addresses them as pathological issues. It makes suggestions for improving the administrative practice for the effective implementation.

Keywords:
Rural Development, Wage Employment Schemes, MGNREG, Administrative Barriers.

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Poor attendance of village level officers & staff in gramasabha.
Lack of knowledge and skill of Nodal Officer about the development schemes.
(iii) Constant changes in Nodal Officers, which leads to discontinuity.
(iv) Very few gram panchayats place Action taken reports of previous
meeting in the gram sabha.
(v) The meeting notices do not contain agenda notes to be discussed.
(vi) Lack of sufficient publicity among the members to attend gram sabha.
(vii) Lack of interest amongst members to attend gram sabha.
(viii) Gram sabhas are not bereft of narrow parochial thinking, such as nepotism, groupism, dominance of major caste, religion etc. In many cases present gram sabhas have failed to provide social and economic justices.
(ix) Lack of co-operation from the departments outside the administrative jurisdiction of Zilla Panchayat like Revenue
Department etc. Even though, these departments are
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