India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) links a national level social security programme with local governments to successfully scale up employment-intensive infrastructure creation and maintenance as a mechanism for social protection and employment generation (See also Section 3.4 of this report). Since 2005, NEGRA’s has benefited forty-five million households who have contributed in excess of 2 billion days of labour (World Bank, 2010). National poverty alleviation programmes such as these have held a dual-purpose in labour intensive approaches for both temporary crisis relief and long-term poverty reduction.