RJD leader, MGNREGA architect Raghuvansh Prasad Singh passes away

RJD leader Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, the driving force behind the rural jobs scheme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), breathed his last at the AIIMS on Sunday due to post Covid-19 complications.

He was 74.

A strong supporter of RJD founder Lalu Prasad, Singh had a fall out with the party a few days back and had shot off his resignation letter from the hospital bed. Lalu Prasad, who is incarcerated in the Ranchi jail, had written back to him rejecting the resignation.

Singh had also written a letter to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, which was seen as an attempt to cozy up to the JD(U) ahead of the Bihar assembly elections later this year.

A doctorate in mathematics, Singh was linked closely with the farmers’ movement in Bihar and had a keen understanding of rural India, an experience that held him in good stead during his stint as Rural Development Minister in the UPA-I government.

Singh was regarded as the brain behind MGNREGA which has stood the test of time in creating employment opportunities in villages across the country.

A five-term Lok Sabha member, Singh was pushed to the margins of the RJD after the incarceration of Lalu Prasad and the emergence of Tejashwi Yadav to the forefront of party affairs.

Singh contested unsuccessfully from Vaishali parliamentary constituency in 2014 and 2019.

“Dear Raghuvansh babu, what have you done. Only the day before yesterday I had said you are going nowhere. And now you have gone so far away. I am speechless. I am sad. You will be remembered a lot,” Lalu Prasad said on Twitter.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh remembered the “mathematician-politician” as a “powerful speaker in Parliament who earned the respect of one and all by his transparent sincerity and integrity”.

Ramesh said the MGNREGA was promised by the Congress in its 2004 Lok Sabha manifesto and Singh, as Rural Development Minister, took it forward, giving it final shape and piloting it through the Union Cabinet and Parliament with “great exuberance and skill”.