The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) aims at enhancing the livelihood security of people in rural areas by guaranteeing 100 days of wage payment in a financial year to those rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. A vast majority of these individuals are marginal farmers and landless laborer's whose incomes are insufficient to support their family. For long, they have been dependent on casual wage works involving migration – seasonal or on a long-term basis. Keeping such section of the population in mind, the MGNREGA was launched in 2006. The Act seeks to create durable assets and strengthen the livelihood resource base of the rural poor. The single major difference between the previous welfare schemes and MGNREGA is that all the previous schemes and programmer were allocation based while MGNREGA is a demand-based programmer.

The choice of works suggested in the Act addresses causes of chronic poverty, like drought, deforestation, soil erosion, and so on, so that the process of employment generation is carried out on a sustainable basis. There are numerous examples of such exemplary works being undertaken as a part of this scheme. This volume of case studies is the culmination of an intensive documentation exercise done by a very talented pool of researchers. These case studies have been picked up from various states including Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal and serve as representative specimens of how the benefits of the scheme have been leveraged to improvise upon the natural resources and public goods.]