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# SGRY

Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana (SGRY) was launched as a nationwide program on 25 September 2001 to address rural employment and infrastructure-related issues. With the introduction of SGRY, the government discontinued previous employment programs like Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojana (JGSY) and Employment Assurance Schemes (EAS). The motivation to implement SGRY was to integrate different programs for wage employment into one universal scheme. Initially, SGRY operated as two streams with approximately equal outlays. From 2004, SGRY worked as a single program. Like NREGA, SGRY envisaged the generation of wage employment and rural infrastructure creation through labor-intensive public projects. The central (federal) and the state governments shared the program’s overall cost in the ratio of 75:25.

# NREGA

NREGA guarantees 100 days of unskilled manual work per annum to every rural household at the state-defined minimum wage. The ministry of rural development implemented NREGA in three phases. Starting from 2006, NREGA covered the country’s 200 most economically backward districts in its first year. The criteria for judging a district’s backwardness were based on measures like agricultural productivity, past agricultural wage level, and the density of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in a district.<sup>6</sup> In NREGA’s second phase, an additional 130 districts were covered by 2007. By the third phase in 2008, every district in the country had NREGA. Like its predecessor, NREGA aims to generate wage employment and develop rural infrastructure through public works. NREGA is a self-targeting anti-poverty policy where the government, as an employer of last resort, provides income insurance to the rural poor while creating productive public infrastructure. During the financial year 20092010, NREGA generated around 2.6 billion work-days and employed approximately 55 million households. The total expenditure under NREGA amounted to about 0.6 percent of the GDP (nearly 5 percent of the agricultural output) during the same year.

# SGRY During NREGA Implementation

This section highlights the similarities between the two programs and discusses the continued existence of SGRY during the phase-wise implementation of NREGA. As panel (a), figure 1 shows, adjusted for 2000 prices, nearly 40 billion Indian rupees were spent on SGRY at the national level in its first year in 2001. The expenditure at the national level under SGRY progressively increased to nearly 60 billion rupees by 2005. In comparison, the federal spending under NREGA in 2006 was approximately 70 billion rupees, which substantially increased to 118 billion and 178 billion in 2007 and 2008, respectively. This increase was primarily due to the scale-up of NREGA during its second and third phases.

Panel (b), figure 1 shows the annual employment generated under SGRY and NREGA at the national level in millions of person-days. As expected, the employment trend under the two programs closely matches the trend in national expenditure. Panels (a) and (b) of figure 1 highlight that although at a relatively smaller scale, a significant amount of spending and employment generation did occur under SGRY. It is important not to infer from the overlap of program expenditure in panel (a), figure 1 that both programs were simultaneously in operation in some districts during 2006 and 2007. Rather, SGRY was exclusively present only in those districts that NREGA did not cover.

Figure 2 illustrates this point more clearly by showing district level maps for southern India.<sup>7</sup> Panel (a), figure 2 shows the rollout of NREGA in its first phase in 2006. The “non-NREGA” or “late-phase” districts are in white, while the shaded districts are the phase-I districts. In contrast, panel (b), figure 2, shows the employment expenditure that occurred in SGRY or NREGA in 2006. Similarly, panels (c) and (d) of figure 2 show that even during the phase-II implementation of NREGA in 2007, SGRY was operational in the non-NREGA districts. Therefore, the district-level expenditure maps show that SGRY continued to operate in the non-NREGA districts during the phase-wise implementation of NREGA in 2006 and 2007.

> 6 This index was primarily based on district-specific and time-invariant fixed effects.

> 7 Maps for the whole country haven’t been displayed due to restrictions from the Cartography Unit at the World Bank. See the working paper version for the country maps.