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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | How MGNREGS is Gradually Being Choked of Funds -Prabhat Patnaik

How MGNREGS is Gradually Being Choked of Funds -Prabhat Patnaik

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published Published on Dec 5, 2021   modified Modified on Dec 6, 2021

-Newsclick.in

The Narendra Modi government has carried the practice of making low budgetary allocations for MGNREGS to its limit.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or MGNREGS was introduced by the United Progressive Alliance-I government despite opposition from the neo-liberal lobby within it, owing inter alia to the active intervention of the Left, which was supporting that government from outside.

The scheme was restrictive from the beginning: it promised a maximum of only 100 days of employment in a year, and that too for just one member of a rural household. But within those restrictions, it conferred an economic right: employment could not be refused and if it was not provided within a certain period then the person seeking employment had to be paid compensation. It was, in short, a demand-driven programme: employment had to be provided on demand.

During UPA-II itself the backsliding on MGNREGS had begun. For many years the budgetary allocation for the programme was pegged at around Rs 60,000 crore, which meant making no allowances for the rise in prices, the increase in the size of the workforce (and hence, even if other things remained the same, the increase in the number of job-seekers) and, of course, the deepening agrarian crisis.

Whenever the issue of this niggardliness was raised in Parliament, the government’s stock answer was that since MGNREGS was a demand-driven programme, the budgetary allocation for it was of no great significance; the actual allocation would be revised according to demand, and would be increased if it was found that a large number of persons were indeed asking for employment under the scheme.

The problem with this answer is that even if the allocation for MGNREGS gets increased because of higher demand, this increase takes time, which means the building up of wage arrears, distress in the interim for MGNREGS workers, and hence a discouragement even to seek jobs under the scheme.

Thus, low initial allocation for MGNREGS has an effect on the demand for jobs under the scheme itself, instead of demand being unaffected by the initial allocation which can supposedly be increased later to accommodate it. And when the non-payment of wages chokes off demand for jobs under the scheme, this fact is used to justify retrospectively the low initial budgetary allocation for the scheme, and becomes an argument for keeping the allocation low for the next year as well.

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Newsclick.in, 5 December, 2021, https://www.newsclick.in/how-mgnregs-gradually-being-choked-funds?fbclid=IwAR2jL2kugwShhV2rBVykR_mlL4Ahl7OZhhWxxECCh1doWymMlxa3FREF3Ws


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