The NDA’s false parenthood claim
The BJP dismissed MGNREGS. If it wants to claim it, it should expand its scope and pay dues
In addition to its diverse achievements as the world’s largest social welfare programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has the unique accomplishment, which has got highlighted in the wake of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), of getting new putative fathers and mothers, new ownership and inventorship claims, and the twin triumphs of wisdom by hindsight and selective amnesia.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s ministers and eminent functionaries are living down the Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s jibe of “monumental failure” against his present jewel in the crown, the MGNREGS, by semantic hair-splitting that he meant to improve and enlarge it. Still others are characterising the current MGNREGS debate as a desperate attempt by Sonia Gandhi to claim false ownership. They forget that the same “monumental failure” jibe was repeatedly recast by today’s ruling powers of today, and members and chairperson of the erstwhile National Advisory Council (NAC), which conceptualised MGNREGS, were called “jholawallahs”. Why should those who are derisively classified by the current political masters as “urban Naxals,” “Left-leaning armchair socialists/communists”, the “Khan Market gang” or “Lutyens’ elite,” not take credit for something which neither the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) nor the BJP, nor even the Congress thought of for six decades, is beyond comprehension. Some government critics tend to use words that suggest that the Congress and NAC claims to it are akin to admitting to a crime.
The scale of MGNREGS is huge. As of March 31, this legally guaranteed provision of work upon demand (a singularly innovative concept in itself) to anyone in designated rural areas, has, from inception, touched the lives of 120 million people, provided 1,200 crore of person days of employment, paid out wages aggregating thousands of crore, spread over 1.46 million diverse items of rural work, of which 60% are complete, up and running. It is not surprising, because for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and NAC, programmes such as the Right to Information, the mid-day meal scheme, the National Rural Health Mission, the food security Act, among others, were articles of faith, not opportunistic ploys.
Equally amusing is the reference by the eminence grises of the government to ownership claims of platforms such as the Jan Dhan Yojana as the reason for MGNREGS’s success. They omit the affectionate terms of endearment their own leaders used for the seminal Aadhaar scheme, which has been operational since 2009. Despite Aadhaar being the heart and soul of the Direct Benefit Transfers (DBTs), it was termed by BJP legislator Meenakshi Lekhi as a “fraud” programme in 2012, adding: “This is a dangerous programme to regularise the illegal stay of migrants in the country. Is Bharat Mata so open to illegal migrants?” The late Ananth Kumar argued: “If you illegally enter other countries, you are shot at or put in jail. But if anyone illegally enters India, he is given citizenship. This is the contribution of Aadhaar .... Aadhaar is the biggest fraud in the country.” Such opportunistic political gaffes, whether qua MGNREGS or Aadhaar or the Goods and Services Tax will continue to haunt their authors, despite the fragility of institutional memory.
Individual opportunism apart, institutional memory cannot efface the admitted fact that DBT was started in January 2013, and was formally announced in the budget of 2013. Fact checkers who trashed the BJP’s claims of authorship of DBT were ignored, and in 2017 PM claimed: “We started direct benefit transfer scheme. This resulted in money reaching to its rightful owner. We successfully eliminated middlemen.”
The government has rightly allocated an additional ~40,000 crore as a Covid-19 fiscal stimulus to MGNREGS. Indeed, this is one of its main fiscal, Covid-19 components, while 90% of the remaining is misleading monetary policy, supply side announcements, clumsily camouflaged as being a fiscal stimulus. The UPA government kept increasing allocations every year to MGNREGS since its inception. In FY 2009-10, ~16,000 crore was allocated to the scheme. The next year, it was increased by 150% to ~39,100 crore. This government’s apologists who are misleading the national discourse should point out a single year of such significant increase by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the last six years. It appears that Modi 1.0 and 2.0 have averaged an annual 12.8% increase in MGNREGS allocation, which is much less than the lowest increase by UPA 1 and 2.
American author Maxine Kingston rightly said: “In a time of destruction, create something.” The original parents of such beneficial social welfare schemes have no problem if their success spawns new parents and new ownership. But during the “destruction” wrought by the virus, why is this government maintaining a strategic silence regarding the increase of MGNREGS’ from 100 days to 200?
Why are we not at least attempting to move closer to universally paying minimum wages under MGNREGS? Why is the government not clearing its dues of ~16,000 crore, which reduces its actual claimed MGNREGS package of one lakh crore rupees to ~84,000 crore? Why are ministers hiding the fact that instead of 100 days, the ground reality suggests the fulfilment of barely 75 days in many cases, even 50 in some? Why can the government not enhance the boundaries of this successful scheme to six months or to the end of the pandemic? Why has this fear of fiscal deficit and/ or the terror of downgrades by rating agencies paralysed this government, which does not seem to be aware of elementary concepts such as monetising debt to liberally fund lifeline schemes such as MGNREGS?
It is only when you achieve, even partially, the above imperatively urgent reforms to MGNREGS that the nation will at least consider recognising you as adoptive, not biological, parents of the scheme.