World Bank has ranked the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Gurantee Act (MGNREGA) as the world’s largest public works programme.
It was revealed in recently released World Bank Group’s report titled ‘The State of Social Safety Nets 2015‘.
Report Highlights

• MGNREGA (under Ministry of Rural Development) provides social security net to 182 million beneficiaries i.e. almost 15 per cent of the India’s population.
• Mid-day meal scheme (under Ministry of Human Resource Development) has been classified as biggest school feeding programme. It benefits around 105 million beneficiaries.
• Janani Suraksha Yojna (Under Ministry of Health and Family Welfare) is top-most social security programme with conditional cash transfers. It has 78 million beneficiaries.
• Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme (under Ministry of Rural Development) is the second-largest unconditional cash transfer social security progamme in the world.
• Five middle-income countries running the world’s largest social safety net programmes are India, China, South Africa and Ethiopia.
• The combined spending of 120 developing countries on social safety nets amounted to about 329 billion dollars from 2010 to 2014.
• There is need to improve the efficiency of social safety net programmes such as social and beneficiary registries by strengthening individual countries capacity to target, administer, integrate and evaluate social protection programmes.