Analysis reveals NREGS has mixed effects on forest cover, depending on local conditions and access.
We examine the impacts of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the world's largest workfare program, on forest cover as proxied by vegetation density. We estimate null effects on vegetation for the overall sample as well as for the subsample where we are best able to isolate changes in forest cover, but we find significant treatment effect heterogeneity, with program impacts mediated by pre‐treatment cropland expansion trends and market access. Our findings suggest that any positive and negative effects of NREGS on forest cover offset one another on average, but that program impacts varied by context.
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Chakravarty et al. (2026) studied this question.
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