MGNREGA Public Data

MGNREGA’s public data portal is one of the most remarkable government transparency initiatives in the world. It publishes real-time, transaction-level data on India’s rural employment guarantee programme: job cards issued, works undertaken, muster rolls (who worked, for how many days), and payments made — all down to the Gram Panchayat level. For researchers, this has supported an enormous body of independent work on rural labour markets, programme implementation, corruption, gender equity, and climate adaptation. The data is updated daily and accessible through both the web dashboard and programme APIs. MGNREGA’s public data infrastructure is often held up as a model for how other government schemes should report.