Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 or MGNREGA, popularly known as Manrega, earlier known as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or NREGA, is an Indian social welfare measure that aims to guarantee the 'right to work'. This act was passed on 23 August 2005 and was implemented in February 2006 under the UPA government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh following the tabling of the bill in parliament by the Minister for Rural Development Raghuvansh Prasad Singh.

It aims to enhance livelihood security in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of assured and guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to at least one member of every Indian rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Women are guaranteed one half of the jobs made available under the MGNREGA and efforts are made to ensure that cross the limit of 50%. Another aim of MGNREGA is to create durable assets (such as roads, canals, ponds and wells). Employment is to be provided within 5 km of an applicant's residence, and minimum legal wage under the law is to be paid. If work is not provided within 15 days of applying, applicants are entitled to an unemployment allowance. That is, if the government fails to provide employment, it has to provide certain unemployment allowances to those people. Thus, employment under MGNREGA is a legal entitlement. Apart from providing economic security and creating rural assets, other things said to promote NREGA are that it can help in protecting the environment, empowering rural women, reducing rural-urban migration and fostering social equity, among others."

The act was first proposed in 1991 by then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. It was finally accepted in the parliament and commenced implementation in 625 districts of India. Based on this pilot experience, NREGA was scoped up to cover all the districts of India from 1 April 2008. The statute was praised by the government as "the largest and most ambitious social security and public works program in the world". In 2009 the World Bank had chided the act along with others for hurting development through policy restrictions on internal movement. However in its World Development Report 2014, the World Bank called it a "stellar example of rural development". MGNREGA is to be implemented mainly by gram panchayats (GPs). The law states it provides many safeguards to promote its effective management and implementation. The act explicitly mentions the principles and agencies for implementation, list of allowed works, financing pattern, monitoring and evaluation, and detailed measures to ensure transparency and accountability.