Big Data and Social Welfare Governance: Evaluating MGNREGA’s Impact for Policy Innovation in India

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_41How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Big Data; MGNREGA; Rural Employment; Data Analytics; Digital Governance; and Social Welfare

Abstract

Big Data is changing the way social welfare initiatives are planned, put into action, and evaluated all around the world. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in India is the world’s largest rights-based employment program. It gives us a chance to see how big data may change social protection. The Management Information System (MIS) of MGNREGA creates huge databases, such as job cards, muster rolls, wage payments, and geotagged assets. These data flows create a good environment for advanced analytics to make programs more efficient, open, and accountable.

This article looks at how big data can make MGNREGA’s governance and impact stronger. It shows how Aadhaar and SECC integration may help target beneficiaries, how real-time wage monitoring can find inconsistencies, how predictive analytics can help forecast demand, and how geo-spatial big data can help evaluate assets. There are many opportunities, but problems like data privacy, digital exclusion, and algorithmic preconceived notions need to be solved. The research finds that MGNREGA, because of its size and the digital infrastructure that is already in place, can be a model for data-driven social welfare programs across the country. Using big data ethically can help rural development be more fair, open, and responsible.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Nikita Biswakarma
AU  - Shalini Saxena
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - Big Data and Social Welfare Governance: Evaluating MGNREGA’s Impact for Policy Innovation in India
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Systems and Social Management (ICSSSM-2 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 698
EP  - 711
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_41
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_41
ID  - Biswakarma2025
ER  -