Indians became the masters of their own destiny after 200 years of British colonial rule when India woke up to a new dawn of freedom on August 15, 1947. Even after nearly 70 years of independence, India’s journey of economic transformation apparently is unfinished, with major challenges like malnutrition, poverty, rising unemployment and rural distress remain to be solved substantially and need to be addressed with all commitment and sincerity. To address these issues and to find solutions to them, the governments of the day, since independence have been introducing several welfare programs to bring the nation out of the quagmire of these problems. The unrelenting march of globalization coupled with the economic reforms that were heralded in 1991 has proved to be a bane to the rural India. Probably, after receiving and realizing the increasing deprivation of the common man in the post liberalization period, the UPA Government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has introduced some significant economic rights that constituted social welfare programs earlier as envisaged in the Directive Principles of the State Policy. A spate of rights such as right to information, right to education, right to work and right to food were introduced. It is imperative to understand the whole lot of issues centered around them such as in what ways these rights are realized, why they were introduced and how they will be achieved. The main focus of this research study is to study one such right namely, right to employment under the MGNREGA Act 2005.