Vol. 1, Issue 13, Part D (2015)

Abstract
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act (MGNREGA) was introduced with an aim of improving the purchasing power of the rural people, primarily semi or un-skilled work to people living in rural India, whether or not they are below the poverty line and around one-third of the stipulated workforce is women. The NREGA is the first ever law internationally that guarantees wage employment at an unprecedented scale. The Act came into force on February 2, 2006 and was implemented in a phased manner. Now the NREGA was renamed as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in 2nd October 2009 by the government order of S.O. 1860 (E), dated 30th July, 2010. The main objectives of the study are to study the evolution of MGNREGA and to know the performance of caste-wise job cards of MGNREGA between Kadapa and Chittoor districts. The Present Study is mainly based on secondary sources. This secondary data is collected from various Government of India Reports, MGNREGA site, Books, Articles, and Journals etc. With this data is to be used with the appropriate statistical techniques such as Mean, Coefficient of Variation (C.V), t-test and Annually Compound Growth Rates (ACGR) have been used for the study purpose. The results of the study indicated that there is a significant growth in job cards of the categories of Kadapa and Chittoor districts during the period from 2006-07 to 2015-16 and there is no much variation among SC, ST job cards, but compared to the three groups, it is noted that there is more consistency in distribution of job cards in non SC/ST category.