This paper presents an elasto-plastic element free Galerkin formulation based on Newton-Raphson algorithm for damage growth analysis. Isotropic ductile damage evolution law is used. A study has been carried out in this paper using the proposed element free Galerkin method to understand the effect of initial damage and its growth on structural response of single and bi-material problems. Asimple method is adopted for enforcing EBCs by scaling the function approximation using a scaling matrix, when non-singular weight functions are used over the entire domain of the problem definition. Numerical examples comprising of oneand two-dimensional problems are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in analysis of uniform and non-uniform damage evolution problems. Effect of material discontinuity on damage growth analysis is also presented. © 2010 Indian Academy of Sciences.