JOIN USA day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the rural job scheme “a living reminder” of the Congress governments’ failures, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley proposed a conditional hike of about Rs 5,000 crore in the annual allocation for the programme in 2015-16.
Jaitley on Saturday proposed to earmark Rs 34,699 crore for implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) for the coming financial year. He, however, promised to allocate Rs 5,000 crore more, in case the government could mobilise additional resources.
Presenting the Union Budget 2015-16, Jaitley said that the government was committed to supporting employment in rural areas through the scheme mandated by the MGNREGA, which came into force in 2006 to legally guarantee minimum livelihood security to people in the villages across the country.
“We will ensure that no one who is poor is left without employment. We will focus on improving the quality and effectiveness of activities under the MGNREGA,” Jaitley said in in the Lok Sabha.
His promise came just a day after Modi took a swipe at the Congress over the MGNREGS. “You will have to agree that I have good political sense. I cannot do away with the MGNREGA, as it is a living reminder of your failures,” Modi said, while speaking in Lok Sabha on Friday, obviously targeting the Congress, which seeks to claim credit for the launch of the programme. The prime minister scotched speculation about the new government’s plan to discontinue the scheme.
“I hope to garner some additional resources during the year from tax buoyancy,” Jaitley said, adding that if he was successful, the MGNREGS allocation would be enhanced by Rs 5,000 crore. In his last Budget presented in July, Jaitley had allocated Rs 34,000 crore for the flagship rural job scheme, which was launched by the erstwhile Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government. The budget allocation for 2014-15 was, however, revised to Rs 33000 crore later.
Though the MGNREGS – a pet project of Congress president Sonia Gandhi – provided employment to over 34.50 crore households since 2006-07, it was criticised for not creating durable infrastructural assets in the villages, although the Union government spent over Rs 206, 291 crore for the programme till 2013-14.
The Congress and a section of civil society activists earlier protested the BJP government’s move to tweak the scheme to ensure that it generates durable assets in rural areas as well as to restrict its implementation in some select districts of the country.
While spelling out the proposed allocation for the MGNREGS in the Lok Sabha on Saturday, the minister drew attention of the Congress leader in the House, Mallikarjun Kharge, who was sitting next to Gandhi.