Role of MGNREGA in Creating Assets and Enhancing Agriculture and Allied Activities in Karnataka.

Under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the government of India provides for the creation of durable assets. The individual assets creation is helping the farmers in different ways. The current study's focus is on the role of individual asset creation through MGNREGA and how the programmes/schemes are helping the farmers. During 2019-2020, in India as a whole, a total of 18,60,419 individual assets were created. In the case of Karnataka state in particular, 66,259 individual assets were created. The total assets (individual) created in Karnataka thus formed a significant share. Based on the number of man-days generated by a district, this study divided the districts into high performance and low performance districts. In Karnataka, out of 30 districts, the study selected 10 high performance and 10 low performance districts and one high population district. In each district, one Gram Panchayat (GP) was selected and in each GP, 30 beneficiary households were selected through transit walks in our field visit during the three-year period identified for the study, i.e., 2016-2017, 2015-2016 and 2014-2015. The total sample size was 630. The main objective of the current paper is to investigate how the asset creation has helped the farmers in Karnataka. The main findings of the study are: Nearly half of the households benefited by assets creation during our study. Secondly, the total land cultivation increased. A small number of households benefited from horticulture assets creation and sericulture under the MGNREGA scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]