Vol. 2, Issue 1, Part I (2016)

Abstract
India lives in villages. In rural areas, a majority of people are poor and vulnerable. They depend mainly on the daily wages earned through unskilled, casual, manual labour. They are living often on threshold levels of subsistence to transmigrate to chronic poverty and destitute. Inadequate labour demand and unpredictable situation like natural disaster, illness, all unfavorably impact their employment opportunities. India’s development planning has been sensitively focused on the needs of the poor and trying to reduce poverty and unemployment from the very beginning of the planning era in 1951-52.For the very purpose Government of India has been introducing and implementing various employment programmes throughout the country but no programme gives the guarantee of employment to the poor and the destitute. In 2005, Government of India introduced Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act with the mandate to provide guaranteed 100 days employment to every rural household. This research paper compares some basic objective of MNREGA to the actual performance in the Bangarmau block Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh and find a big gap between the objectives and the actual achievements and poor performance. It also notices the malpractice of proxy employment in the villages.