The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) aims at enhancing the livelihood security of people in rural areas of India by guaranteeing 100 days of wage-employment in a financial year to a rural household whose adult members volunteer to work. The Act also seeks to create durable assets to augment land and water resources, improve rural connectivity and strengthen the livelihood resource base of the rural poor. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) works or activities are largely focused on land and water resources, which include: water harvesting and conservation, soil conservation and protection, irrigation provisioning and improvement, renovation of traditional water bodies, land development and drought proofing. These MGNREGS “Works” are indeed “activities” implemented. These Natural Resource Management (NRM) related Works or activities have the potential to generate environmental benefits such as ground water recharge, soil, water and biodiversity conservation, sustaining food production, halting land degradation and building resilience to current climate risks such as moisture stress, delayed rainfall, droughts and floods (Tiwari et al., 2011; Esteves et al., 2013, MoRD, 2012).
Apart from reducing vulnerability to climate variability and change (Esteves et al., 2013), MGNREGA-NRM activities have the potential to sequester carbon in soil and trees under different activities such as: land development, soil and water conservation, enhanced irrigation and water availability activities leading to increased tree growth, crop biomass production and soil carbon enhancement. Limited evidence is available on the actual or potential impact of MGNREGA programme on carbon sequestration in mitigating the climate change.
Given the scale of the programme (total investment during 2017-18 being Rs. 48,000 crores = US$ 7 billion) and its focus on natural resources, it is important to assess the carbon sequestration potential, as a co-benefit, from MGNREGA. The present study aims to assess the carbon sequestration, as a co-benefit, achieved by the programme and its future potential to deliver climate mitigation co-benefits and in meeting one of the goals and targets of INDC of India, of sequestering 2.5 to 3.0 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2030 through increasing forest and tree cover. Some MGNREGA activities in some locations could lead to decline in carbon stocks, especially Soil Organic Carbon (SOC). Thus, in this report carbon sequestration or stock change resulting from implementation of MGNREGA works is estimated.
MGNREGA programme includes broadly four categories of works that encompass both NRM and non-NRM works. NRM works largely dominate the MGNREGA work implementation in India. NRM activities or works dominated by accounting for about 55% of expenditure in 2014 to about 60% during 2018. This study is focused only on NRM works which have implications for biomass and soil carbon stocks.