The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was enacted in 2005 to improve the rural infrastructure, augment land and water resources, and strengthen the livelihood resource base of the rural poor. It envisioned to provide at least one hundred days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every household whose adult members are willing to do unskilled manual work.
The government is now keen to use MGNREGA to achieve climate target specified under the 2016 Paris climate change agreement. Accordingly, the Ministry of Rural Development has announced a proposal in this regard on the sidelines of COP 24 in Katowice, Poland.
A report released in July 2019 informs that the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has made a preliminary assessment on this and it has found that drought-proofing activities under MGNREGA can achieve removal or sequestration of about 197 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030, which is 8 per cent of the climate target. If the work focused on climate change alone, the scheme has a far higher potential.
Climate-oriented activities like draught-proofing can contribute sizeably to meeting the target.
Accordingly, the IISc scientists are conducting a pan-India assessment to know the potential of the move. The activities that have the potential to sequester CO2 are drought-proofing, land development, the revival of traditional water bodies, and water harvesting.
Drought-proofing will increase the resilience of community by helping them to cope with droughts, and with tree planting, the emissions intensity of India’s gross domestic product will decrease by 33–35 per cent compared to 2005 levels by 2030.
To tackle climate change, India has to meet three key targets: building capacity for 40 per cent electric power from non-fossil fuel, cut in emissions by 33–35 per cent from the 2005 level, and create carbon sinks of about 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes.
Work Undertaken Environmental Benefits of MGNREGA (MGNREGA-EB) is a project being implemented since 2013, with support from the ministry of rural development (MoRD), in three states, namely Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. The programme contributes to natural resource management (NRM) by mandating 60 per cent of its total expenditure annually on water harvesting and conservation, afforestation, plantation, land and soil development, and other NRM- related works.
innovative models for holistic watershed and landscape-based MGNREGA can bring about tangible environmental benefits. Many of the benefits are now visible. Afforestation of barren hillocks in highly drought-affected areas in Andhra Pradesh has been enlarged to 10,150 hectares by the state government. Renewal of 124 cascade tanks covering the entire Champavati river basin is being undertaken in the state. Block plantations alongside the Mahanadi river in Chhattisgarh have contributed to preventing soil erosion, as well as providing livelihood to 134 women of 16 self-help groups (SHGs) through the provision of legal usufruct rights. Other technical innovations including groundwater recharge wells, root zone water harvesting systems, drainage line treatments, and participatory irrigation management have been demonstrated in the three states.
The ministry of rural development is piloting a project in 103 blocks of Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Bihar to see how MGNREGA can be used to make villages resilient to climate change that causes changes in the monsoon patterns, more dry days and flash floods.
In Chhattisgarh’s Kokdakhar village (Kabirdhan district), a dam has been built under MGNREGA by the villagers. The 4.5 m deep and 63 m long earthen dam is the only source of water to save the continuous drought-prone area. The dam, which captures the flow from the ridge to the valley, stores water and arrests erosion. The mapping by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has found Kawardha block, to which Kodakhar belongs, to be one of the most vulnerable to rising temperature and the vagaries of the monsoon. According to IISc, it recorded a 1-degree temperature increase from 1984 to 2014 and received only four years of normal sowing rains in the same 30-year period, indicating its vulnerability to climate change. The water table of the area is very low. The MGNREGA’s earthen dam saved the village from the threat of climate change catastrophe.
In Bharati village in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh stopped the mass-migration of its young people to cities after climate-proofing works of connecting a network of six large ponds was implemented in 2017. Some villages have managed to utilise natural spring water by routing it to farm ponds for fish farming. It is clearly evident that MGNREGA projects are helping in growing multiple crops and coping better with flood or droughts.
Expanding climate-proofing projects under MGNREGA will definitely help to mitigate the risks of climate change as the scheme covers maximum rural areas and addresses the needs of the local people.
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