With 99% MGNREGA Funds Exhausted, MPs, MLAs Write to PM

NEW DELHI: Alarmed by the massive funds crunch in the rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGA, members of Parliament and MLAs from Karnataka, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar have written to the Prime Minister, seeking more funds.

With the Lok Sabha elections six months away, the lawmakers from various parties said they recognised the need to bring MGNREGA ( Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) to the centre of political discourse and agreed to include specific commitments to strengthening it in their election manifestos.

At a press conference here on Friday, prominent economists and activists and MGNREGA workers from various states, academics, and members of the Peoples’ Action for Employment Guarantee, NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, disclosed that as per the Management Information System, 99% of this year’s allocation was already exhausted and no additional funds had been approved.

“With the lean agricultural season beginning, demand for work will increase but the programme is starved of funds,” the activists said in a release.

The allocation of MGNREGA as a percentage of GDP has declined from 0.51% in 2010-11 to 0.38% in 2017-18. For each of the last five years, 20% of the total funds available have been used to clear pending liabilities of the previous years, leaving a woefully inadequate amount for running the programme, they said.

At a critical juncture when agrarian distress has brought farmers out on the streets in various states, the Central government is “deliberately undermining the only legal guarantee of employment for the most marginalised, particularly in times of acute rural distress,” they said.

Sanjay Sahni, an activist from Muzaffarpur, Bihar, said “If there were adequate funds and payments were made on time, lakhs of more workers would demand employment. In fact, FIRs are being filed against us to discourage workers from demanding work under the programme”.

Brinda Karat, CPI(M) leader and a former MP, said there was need to add the demand for the delinking of Aadhaar from MGNREGA and underscore the importance of social audit, as the scheme had played an important role in protecting the lives, livelihoods and wages of rural workers.

All the participants in Friday’s meeting acknowledged the need to view farmer and rural workers’ issues as linked and the need to address both to alleviate rural distress.

Sitaram Yechury (CPI(M)) said not only is the Left united in their support for MGNREGA, “we will prioritise MGNREGA in the upcoming Bharat Bandh on January 8-9”.

Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani, who is a MLA in Gujarat, called for increasing MGNREGA employment to 200 days. The Prime Ministers’ lack of support for MGNREGA and his 2015 remark on the programme is a slap in the face of the rural poor across the country for whom MGNREGA is a lifeline, he said.

Yogendra Yadav of Swaraj Abhiyan said “For the first time the farmers’ movement has formally accepted MGNREGA as their issue in addition to crop insurance and loan waivers”.

All those present in the gathering also endorsed a letter to the Prime Minister calling for “swift, sensitive and timely action and demonstrate strong political will to protect the legal entitlement of millions of rural workers”.