Article Impact of MGNREGA on a Tightened Labour Market Akhil Alha 1 Abstract The study discusses the impact of the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) on an already tightened rural labour market through a field survey conducted in two villages of Rajasthan. The article argues that the impact of the programme in a constricted rural labour market has been marginal because of a low off-take of work because of already developed alternate livelihood strategies which reduced the incentive to work in this programme. Nevertheless, the scheme has been instrumental in two ways: first, it led to the withdrawal of lower caste women from agricultural work which signifies an escape from the exploitative production relations in the two villages under study; and second, it has resulted in the formation of an exclusive category of MGNREGA workers consisting of female workers from the middle castes who were previously were not participating in paid labour. Keywords MGNREGA, rural labour market, lower caste, women, exploitation Perhaps no other employment generating programme has attracted more scholarly attention as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has done. Since its inception in 2006, a large number of studies have assessed the programme’s impact on poverty alleviation and generation of income opportunities. A few of them have also claimed that the programme has caused an upward pressure on farm and non-farm wages in rural areas. 1 Rajasthan Social Change 47(4) 1–13 © CSD 2017 SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/0049085717728004 http://sch.sagepub.com 1 Assistant Professor, Council for Social Development, New Delhi, India. Corresponding author: Akhil Alha, Assistant Professor, Council for Social Development, 53 Lodhi Estate, New Delhi 110003, India. Email: akhil@csdindia.org