In rural India, water security and work relief are closely intertwined. Work relief describes government welfare programs that provide jobs in public works to people in need. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is a landmark social welfare program established in 2005, the first of its kind to provide livelihood security to underserved rural communities, while turning public investments into sustainable outcomes.
MGNREGS provides at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment per year to every household whose adult members volunteer for unskilled manual work, such as constructing ponds or roads. Natural resource management (NRM) sits at the scheme’s core, with a majority of its expenditure focused on enhancing natural resources to boost agricultural productivity, water availability and disaster mitigation.
As of 2026, MGNREGS has been replaced by a new iteration, the Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB–G RAM G) Act. VB–G RAM G will bring some changes but, retain NRM and water security as the focus.
Investments through MGNREGS exceeding 7 trillion rupees ($80 billion) in the past decade have resulted in 21 million NRM assets, making the program a key driver of drought-proofing, water conservation, irrigation expansion, groundwater recharge and land development across rural India — while simultaneously guaranteeing the right to work for the rural poor.
From 2023 to 2025, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) worked on the project Water security and climate adaptation in rural India (WASCA), in partnership with the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and the Indian government. This work united different government development programs — such as MGNREGS — to converge their resources for the shared goal of enhancing rural water security while addressing climate challenges. To assist with this convergence, IWMI identified mechanisms to measure, monitor and scale the environmental and developmental impacts of the MGNREGS national scheme.
Researchers from IWMI analyzed nearly 10 million work records across 660 districts in India, covering more than a decade of expenditure data, to understand the allocation of funding for MGNREGS. To make this data more accessible, they created the MGNREGS Explorer, an interactive online platform that shows where investments have been allocated. The platform enables users to analyze how MGNREGS funding has been used across different years and states through graphs and charts.
It also categorizes work into NRM and non-NRM activities, and further into water-related subcategories such as irrigation expansion and efficiency, groundwater recharge, drainage, and soil and water conservation. This shows what kinds of projects have been undertaken and enables comparison with a district’s needs.
What makes the Explorer powerful is not just the aggregation of data, but its alignment with agricultural water management typologies — the classification of districts based on their agriculture and water challenges. Planners can now visualize expenditure patterns at national, subnational and district levels, and compare them with local agri-water priorities.
For instance, a groundwater-stressed district can assess whether investments are directed toward recharge and efficiency. By linking the program’s expenditure to agri-water challenges, the tool enables evidence-based planning and resource convergence across schemes.
The initial MGNREGS program management information system only tracked financial spending and employment generation — not environmental or developmental outcomes. Tracking these outcomes is essential as they enable accountability while providing a holistic understanding of the return on investment on NRM.
To bridge this gap, IWMI developed the MGNREGS Impact Monitoring Application (MiRA), an app designed for government officials. MiRA links each of the 266 public works under the scheme to specific input indicators and outcomes, including water management, irrigation, plantation and land improvement.
Where outcomes cannot be directly measured, the tool uses scientifically grounded estimation methods, such as the Groundwater Estimation Committee guidelines for recharge or species-specific formulas for carbon sequestration. These estimates are derived by linking recorded MGNREGS activities like reforestation or pond construction to their expected environmental outcomes. Using activity-specific input indicators —plant species and pond dimensions — as inputs into established scientific formulas, the tool traced a measurable chain from program expenditure to environmental impact.
Piloted across districts in Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, MiRA demonstrated how outcome-based monitoring can reshape planning. In Ramanathapuram district in Tamil Nadu, work logged from 2023 to 2024 in MiRA showed potential creation of over 1,100 hectares of irrigation, recharge of 1.4 million cubic meters of groundwater and reclamation of more than 4,000 hectares of land. These estimates help translate “works completed” into “water secured” and “land improved.”
As noted by Aditi Singh the director of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, tools such as MGNREGS Explorer and MiRA hold great potential for supporting planning and decision making at scale.
MGNREGS Explorer and MiRA have shifted the focus from expenditure tracking to outcome-oriented governance. By embedding spatial analysis, typology alignment and outcome estimation into decision-making, IWMI has helped strengthen the scheme’s water security lens.
In a climate-stressed future, programs like MGNREGs (now VB- GRAM-G) can help fast-track employment, poverty reduction and water security.
