Demand for work from individuals under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme (MGNREGS) has been on the wane since July this year and fell to its lowest in 34 months to 19.2 million persons in August, mirroring an improvement in economic activities in the urban centres.
However, an even sharper decline in the supply of the jobs under the popular scheme — person days (work) generated in August was a fourth of that in May– indicate that the authorities have curbed spending on the scheme.
Paucity of funds could be one of the reasons for suppressed demand, one labour activist said. Of the Rs 73,000 crore budgetary allocation for the scheme, already Rs 48,275 crore has been spent as on September 2. The rural development ministry may have to seek an additional outlay for the scheme in the supplementary budget for 2022-23.
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The scheme’s mandate under the MGNREG Act, 2005, is to provide at least 100 days of ‘wage employment’ in a financial year to every rural household whose adult member volunteers to do unskilled manual work. However, while an average of only 50.07 days of work was provided to such rural households in 2021-22; so far in the current fiscal, it stands at 32.2 days.
This is despite the fact that only 46 million households have worked for the scheme so far compared with entire last fiscal’s 72.6 million. Also only 63.2 million individuals workers have worked this year so far compared with 106.2 million in the last fiscal.
Aganst a total of 3.63 billion person days of work generation in the entire last fiscal, 1.48 billion person days of work have been generated thus far in the current year under the scheme.
Some analysts feel the authorities are going slow on reporting the demand at the ground level, given that more than 66% of the Budget allocation for the current fiscal has already been spent.
Outlay for MG-NREGS had seen huge increases in FY21 and FY22 as the government used it to alleviate rural distress caused by the pandemic.