Resources

A selection of resource material on NREGA

Baba Amte Centre for People’s Empowerment, Samaj Pragati Sahayog

This manual is meant for those individuals and organisations who will be involved in planning, implementing and/or monitoring NREGA. These can be PRI representatives, grass-roots NGOs or government officials engaged with this process at different levels. The manual is focused on earthen water harvesting structures that will be built under NREGA. These are likely to form the bulk of the work done under the scheme.

The manual is organised into 17 chapters. The first two chapters provide an introduction to NREGA. They outline the historic significance of the Act and also provide a brief summary of its official guidelines. The next four chapters introduce you to the concepts required for an understanding of the watershed approach through which the earthen water harvesting structures are to be built and also the concepts that are used in building these structures. This includes an introduction to the use of maps and also to basic techniques of surveying that help calculate levels and slopes of the land. A separate chapter is devoted to the social and institutional aspects involved in doing this work.

Chapters 7 to 14 introduce the most important watershed structures, one by one. Each chapter tells us about why these structures are built, how we decide where to locate them, how we lay them out over the watershed, how their design is arrived at, how we construct them as also the precautions we need to observe in doing so. Chapter 15 tells us how to use books called the Schedule of Rates in order to estimate how much each of these structures will cost. It teaches this through a series of numerical examples.

Chapter 16 raises a number of questions about the way the Schedule of Rates have been formulated. We provide reasons for why these rates need to be revised. We also suggest that the entire process of arriving at these rates needs to be much more location-specific, as also transparent and participatory in nature.

Finally, Chapter 17 teaches the basics of the double-entry system of accounts, through a series of typical transactions to be handled by the implementing agency.

For hard copies of the manual, please contact core@samprag.org specifying the language and number of copies you want. Each copy will cost you Rs. 300. Cheques in the name of SAMAJ PRAGATI SAHAYOG to be sent to the address below:

Samaj Pragati Sahayog
Bagli
District Dewas
Madhya Pradesh 455227

The soft copy of the manual is free to download
Download manual - English version (Pdf)
Download manual - Hindi version (Pdf)