Putting house in order

Individual assets created in the first four months of 2020-21 is already

situation of agriculture but can also be a permanent solution to unemployment,” says Sanjay Sharma, who has successfully implemented the programme in Siddharthnagar.

There is a political déjà vu around MGNREGA. After coming to power in 2014, and in his first speech in Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had termed MGNREGA as a symbol of the erstwhile UPA government’s “monumental failure”. Modi junked the programme as an affront to Indians’ dignity as it let them dig tanks and ponds. Soon after the labour crisis went out of control due to job loss under lockdown, Modi made MGNREGA the centrepiece of his relief package for rural India. This year the Union government has budgeted 1.20 lakh crore for the public wage programme, including an additional allocation of 40,000 crore in July.

All states, barring Delhi and Union Territories, have made special provisions under MGNREGA to create employment for returning workers. They are using the programme as the sole vehicle to tide over the crisis of unemployment in rural areas. At present, the political leadership is using the programme as a tool to tide over the crisis created by the pandemic. Trivendra Singh Rawat, chief minister of Uttarakhand, where several villages now lie deserted due to mass exodus of people from rural areas, feels that the programme can play a critical role in reviving the state’s rural economy. Following the lockdown, the state has seen a wave of reverse migration for the first time in years. Rawat, who wants these people to stay, pins his hope on MGNREGA. People should be allowed to work on their own fields under MGNREGA, he demands. That means paying people to help them once again take up their primary occupation, which is agriculture. This is what the programme is already doing. It may be the inadvertent fallout of the pandemic; but it’s a new understanding of MGNREGA.