Each beneficiary rural household received just 50 days of wage employment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MG-NREGS) in 2021-22, against the scheme’s mandate to provide at least 100 days of employment to every such household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work in every financial year.
A parliamentary standing committee recently recommended hiking guaranteed days of work under the MG-NREGS to at least 150 days. The FY22 achievement is only one-third of the recommendation.
Also, demand for MG-NREGS work remained higher than the pre-pandemic level in FY22, though there was a 4% decline from FY21. This indicates the rural areas are yet to recover fully from the distress caused by Covid-19. According to the MG-NREGS dashboard, 72.5 million households worked under the scheme in 2021-22, down from 75.5 million in 2020-21, but higher than 54.8 million in 2019-20 and 52.7 million in 2018-19.
A total of 3.62 billion person days of work were generated in 2021-22, around 7% lower than 3.89 billion in 2020-21. In 2019-20, 2.65 billion person days of work was generated and 2.68 billion in 2018-19.
Noted labour economist Santosh Mehrotra said demand for work under the MG-NREGS has increased in the last two years, mainly due to the distress the pandemic caused on rural households. The rise in demand is also because a whopping 32 million people have migrated back to rural areas, where excess labour was already an issue.
“Against this, the Centre’s allocation to the fund the scheme has neither been adequate nor timely. It should have a fair estimate of the scheme’s expenditure right at the beginning of the year and not at the supplementary stage. This would help states to estimate work demand well in advance and distribute works among the needy,” Mehrotra said
The government maintains that the MG-NREGS is a dem-and-driven scheme and allocations would be made according to demand. But after a big spurt in MG-NREGS spending in FY21, the government, mindful of fiscal constraints, seems to have regulated the release of funds to the scheme. However, this leads to long delays in payments of work done besides a decline in the work offered.
“Supplementary allocations generally come towards the end of the financial year and by then work gets massively affected,” said Debmalya Nandy of the MGNREGA Sangharsh Morcha.
In FY19, the RE was revised to Rs 61,830 crore from Rs 55,000 crore at the BE level. In FY20, the BE was raised from Rs 60,000 crore to Rs 71,002 crore. The jump was higher from Rs 61,500 crore to Rs 1.11 trillion in FY21. In FY22, it was raised from Rs 73,000 crore at the BE stage to Rs 98,000 crore at the RE stage.
The BE for 2022-23 has been kept at Rs 73,000 crore.
Moreover, there were payment dues of Rs 12,000 crore at the end of FY22, which could eat into the current year’s allocation.
