This book examines the inclusive development experiences and impacts of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). It discusses the theoretical assumptions underlying the inclusive development of Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS), and draws conclusions based on robust data and real-world experiences with the MGNREGS - which has attracted global attention as India's most ambitious, rights-based development initiative and most expansive work-based social security measure, the world's largest public works programme, and people-centric approach to development. The book argues that the Scheme holds vast potential, and, in fact, has made significant contribution to the promotion of livelihoods of the poorest of the poor, but that the weak institutions of local-self-governance, entrusted for implementation of the Scheme, are incapable of exploiting them to the full. It ends with a concrete policy suggestion: the inclusive development experiences gathered with the EGS and presented here could offer a source of policy change in many developing Afro-Asian countries whose situations are similar to India's, provided the local conditions in the respective country are taken into consideration when designing the EGS. Its significance as a social security measure has increased in post-COVID loss of jobs and livelihoods of the poor.

Ashok Pankaj is a professor at the Council for Social Development, New Delhi. His areas of interest and research are: law and political economy of development in India, with a focus on public policy, institutions of governance and development, and interface between democracy and development. He is a keen observer of rural society of India, and has closely followed rural development programmes, especially MGNREGA. He has conducted about two dozen sponsored field based studies on socio-economic developments in India. He has edited four books, viz. 'Right to Work and Rural India: Working of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)', (2012); 'Subalternity, Exclusion and Social Change in India', (2014); 'Dalits, Subalternity and Social Change in India', (2018); and 'Social Sector Development in North-east India', (2020) and contributed numerous articles to reputed professional journals, like Contributions to Indian Sociology, Sociological Bulletin, South Asia Research, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, International Studies, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Social Scientist, Contemporary South Asia, Poverty in Focus, among others.

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