Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Friday said the new VB-G RAM G law, replacing the MGNREGA, will prove to be "very harmful" for the poor of the country as the scheme to provide rural employment opportunities to them will die after states will be unable to make financial allocations to it.
For 20 years, she said, MGNREGA has been one of the good schemes that has run and helped poor people, especially those who have nothing.
"This Bill is going to be very very harmful for the poorest of the poor because the original MGNREGA scheme, the way it was structured - where the Centre paid 90 per cent of the funds - was the backbone of the rural economy and the greatest support for people who are very poor and had difficulty getting employment," she told reporters outside the Parliament.
"Now, in this new form of the Bill, when you cut down so much of the allocation of funds from the Centre and the most of the allocation is going to come from the states, the states are not going to be able to afford it. It means that the scheme will die, and that is going to be very very harmful," Vadra said.
The Parliament on Thursday night passed the VB-G RAM G Bill, that seeks to replace the 20-year-old MGNREGA and guarantee 125 days of rural wage employment every year, amid vociferous protests by the opposition, with Union minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan asserting that it was needed to fix shortcomings in the old scheme.
The Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G) Bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha with a voice vote, hours after the Lok Sabha cleared it on Thursday, amid strong protests by the opposition over the removal of Mahatma Gandhi's name from the existing rural employment guarantee scheme MGNREGA and accusing the government of putting the financial burden on states.