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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Amid agri crisis, pain for rural India as Modi govt chokes MGNREGS funding -Khabar Lahariya & Shreehari Paliath

Amid agri crisis, pain for rural India as Modi govt chokes MGNREGS funding -Khabar Lahariya & Shreehari Paliath

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published Published on May 6, 2018   modified Modified on May 6, 2018
-Business Standard/ India Spend

Delays in wage payment have been a constant throughout MGNREGS implementation

Bachcha Lal’s shirt hung loosely over his frail body, exposing his sunken collarbones, as he stood outside his straw-thatched home in central Uttar Pradesh’s (UP) Bundelkhand region. “They all rely on me,” he said, pointing towards his tubercular son, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter. Illiterate and a landless labourer, 65-year-old Lal makes about Rs 175 a day when he finds work digging ditches or building roads under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).

“When the government first presented the MGNREGS to us, I thought that we’d get our money on time. I thought that I wouldn’t have to deal with abuse or unnecessary altercations, and that I’d be able to work well since it was a government initiative,” Lal told IndiaSpend. His experience could not have been more different. “We don’t get our wages on time. We could work for two days, but then remain unemployed for the next month or even the next year and a half or two years,” he said.

Launched in 2006, MGNREGS, the world’s largest rural jobs programme, guarantees 100 days of unskilled work to rural Indians such as Lal. It has 110 million active workers, and the wages it pays are an important source of income in Indian villages at a time when the farm sector is in crisis, more villagers are working as farm labour than as cultivators, and non-farm jobs are not enough to accommodate the large number of people entering the labour force.

Starting today, IndiaSpend will analyse the successes and failures of this scheme, and the challenges it faces, in a three-part series. This first part analyses budget allocations to find that despite heightened farm unrest, this year the government has set aside the least proportion of money for the scheme–48% of the budget of the rural development ministry–in the three years since 2016-17.

Reduced funding has resulted in 48% fewer projects getting completed over the six years to 2016. Although expenditure on wages now constitutes 73% of expenditure against the stipulated 60:40 wages-to-materials ratio under MGNREGS guidelines, delays in wage payment are frequent, as the second part will explore.

The final part will focus on how women in the state of Kerala have benefitted from MGNREGS, and what lessons that holds for policymakers.

This investigation is part of IndiaSpend’s series on the government’s performance on key flagship programmes in the run-up to the 2019 elections.

Please click here to read more.


India Spend/ Business Standard, 4 May, 2018, http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/amid-agri-crisis-pain-for-rural-india-as-modi-govt-chokes-mgnregs-funding-118050400103_1.html


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