NREGA Impact Assessment
NREGA Impact Assessment
From HTN
| Project Information | |
|---|---|
| Category | Financial Inclusion |
| Year | 2009 |
| Technology | Remote Multimedia Enterprise Data Entry & Processing System |
| Place | Chennai |
| Organisation | IITM’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) |
Contents |
Introduction
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) notified on the 7th September 2005, aims at enhancing livelihood security of households in rural areas of the country providing at least one hundred days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled labour. He/she will get the minimum wage rate notified for agricultural labour in the State until the Central Government notifies a minimum wage rate, which in any case shall not be less than Rs. 60 per day. The choice of the work suggested in the act addresses causes of chronic poverty such as drought, deforestation and soil erosion, so that the process of employment generation is maintained on a sustainable basis. NREGA came into effect on February 2, 2006 and is the first time law guaranteeing wage employment on such a large scale. The Act was introduced in 200 of the most backward districts of the country in Phase I, an additional of 130 districts were included in Phase II 2007-08 and the remaining 274 rural districts were brought in Phase III 2008-09. Two years of the programme have indicated a need to evolve the design of the monitoring system to address implementation challenges more effectively. Thus Ministry of Rural development (MoRD) has developed a Professional Institutional Network (PIN) for steady, sustainable interventions that enhance the quality of the programme to undertake concurrent monitoring and appraisal, evaluation and impact assessment, research, etc. The Ministry has identified the Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) of IIT Madras to conduct the impact assessment study in the state of TamilNadu.
Objective and scope of the survey conducted
The objective of the study is to highlight the various issues to aid in bridging systemic procedural gaps. The institutions will analyze efficient management practices, procedures, processes, factors that have contributed to the good performance and factors that may limited performance. The districts may be identified in consultation with the Ministry of Rural Development and State Governments.
The survey was conducted in five selected districts of Tamil Nadu, namely Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram, Cuddalore, Dindugal and Nagapattinam. The selection of the districts was done in consultation with the State Government. In each district, two blocks were selected and in each block four Gram Pachayats were chosen, i.e., four work per block were taken into account for the survey. Data was collected from around fifteen workers per work. Research includes primary and secondary data, such as basic physical and financial data of the selected sample area (Monthly Progress Reports I-VII), survey questionnaires, focused group discussions, field visits, interviews with district/block/village level officials, beneficiaries and other stakeholders.
Methodology and expected outcome
Questionnaires were developed targeting specific groups among the stake holders, based on the guidelines from MoRD and survey was conducted. Field observations and interactions are verified from the official records at Gram Panchayats, Blocks and District level and discrepancies were noted. The analysis also took into account the social, economic and cultural context within which NREGA is implemented. Based on the findings of the analysis, remedial actions will be suggested to improve the efficiency of implementation of the Scheme and optimizing its benefits.
Technology
The data collection is performed using mobile phones. Remote Multimedia Enterprise Data Entry & Processing System technology, developed by Reliance IITM Telecom Centre of Excellence (RITCoE), is used for the data collection.
Salient features
- Provides an ideal solution for multimedia information aggregation using a mobile phone which connects to an enterprise database.
- Consists of an easily configurable web interface for form creation, generates the required server side scripts and database schema to interface to an enterprise database.
- Supports quick generation of new field types by the simple drag and drop technology, enabling the user to create a new application without the need of any programming skills.
- Provides multilingual user friendly interface to the end user.
- Supports uploading of form input data, images captured by the mobile phones and voice samples recorded live by the mobile at a given field location to the enterprise database
- Every user could be assigned a specific data collection task with access privileges for uploading the data
- Uploaded data is time stamped along with the IP address of the sender when captured in the enterprise database
- Data is uploaded whenever the mobile phone can establish a GPRS connection to the database. In the absence of a GPRS connection, data collection and validation can be done locally on the mobile phone and later can be uploaded on connection reestablishment
- Supports report generation in various generic formats
Advantages
- Ease of use, both in terms of accessing people in remote locations and multi lingual support facility
- Inherently provides better scalability and reliability
- Facility for better archival and storage of data collected from the field
- Helps in achieving real time updates, faster cycle and turnaround time as well as reduces the use of paper
- Provides faster data analysis and collection of required metrics
Platforms used
| Enterprise side | Mobile side |
| Linux | Opera mini web browser |
| Apache web server | J2ME |
| MySQL Database | HTML |
| PHP Scripts | Java Scripts |
Current Status of the project
More than 600 records, each record containing around 72 fields of different types, were collected and analyzed. The project is in the secondary data validation stage at present.
Last Updated:Anilkroy 07:23, 2 July 2009 (UTC)