Decline in MGNREGA employment

New Delhi: In the last four years, since the NDA government came to power in 2014-15 till February 1, 2018, there has only been a 10 per cent increase in the number of workers who received employment under MGNREGA. In the current fiscal year only 6.87 crore workers received work, which is also 10 per cent less than 7.67 crore workers who had received employment under the flagship scheme in 2016-17.

This comes in sharp contrast to the fact that the government has been describing MGNREGA, which incidentally was the brainchild of the UPA regime, as a game changer in terms of generating employment in rural India.

Just how much significance the Centre accords MGNREGA can be gauged from the fact that there has been a massive 43 per cent jump in the budgetary allocation for the scheme between 2016-17 and 2018-19.

In 2016-17, MGNREGA was allocated Rs 38,500 crore in the Union Budget. This went up to Rs 48,000 crore in the Budget for 2017-18. On February 1, finance minister Arun Jaitley allotted Rs 55,000 crore for the scheme in the 2018-19 Budget.

However, the fall in the number of workers, who received employment under MGNREGA in the last four years, only goes on to show that the scope of work under it needs to be improved. Official sources said that many other works, which till now were not considered under the scheme, would have to be included in it.

According to information available with this newspaper, 6.21 crore workers were provided employment under the job guarantee scheme in 2014-15. However, in the current financial year (till February 1, 2018), 6.8 crore workers have received work under MGNREGA. Clearly, there has been a fall of 10 per cent in the number of employment in the four years of the current Narendra Modi regime.

Incidentally, in 2015-16, there was a huge 16 per cent jump in the number of workers who had received work under the flagship scheme. During that year, 7.2 crore workers had received employment under it. However, in 2016-17, the jump in the number of those given employment was a meagre 6.2 per cent and only 7.6 crore workers received work under MGNREGA as compared to the corresponding year.