Guidelines on convergence with National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS)
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is the first ever law internationally, that guarantees wage employment at an unprecedented scale. NREGA aims at enhancing livelihood security of households in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled, manual work. The Guidelines conceptualize convergence as a coming together of existing schemes and resources, rather than the creation of a new scheme with additional resources. The objective of convergence is to optimize public investments made under existing schemes through suggested ways of linking and steering them towards a common/shared recipient end, both physical (area, infrastructure, natural resource) and human (person, group, agency). The endeavour is to start with existing policy contours, implementation structures, and financial resources.