Slowing MNREGA sows rural pain: Data
NEW DELHI: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGA), one of the country’s best-known social-protection programmes, has suffered serious setbacks this year due to sluggish payments and implementation — complicating recovery from an ongoing rural distress in nine states, data show.
Despite falling rural incomes due to a back-to-back drought, the NDA government has been unable to ramp up work opportunities and provide timely payments at a time when incomes from agriculture — the primary source of rural livelihoods —have dwindled.
A review for 2015-16 — which takes into account data until November 12 — accessed by HT shows three major hiccups: massive delays in wage payments, failure to spend in productive assets and a slowdown in work- completion rates. In 2015-16 so far, nearly half of all MNREGA transactions worth ` 7,200 crore has been delayed.Of this,62%paymentssaw delays of up to a month and 29% payments were held up for up to two months, while about 3% wages took more than three months to reach workers, the data show.
The MNREGA act mandates payments have to be made within 15 days. “Amid all this emphasis on financial inclusion and directbenefits transfers, such delays look criminal, especially when the agricultural labour-market has shrunk,” said Himanshu, who teaches at JNU.
The MNREGA aims to provide livelihood security through guaranteed wage employment for at least 100 days a year to those who seek it, mostly the extremely poor. The UN’s Human Development Index 2015 released last week ter med MNREGA a “milestone”, adding that “its size has no precedent internationally, posing important management challenges”. Slow payments, in fact, are getting entrenched. The percentage of delayed payments increased from 42.4% in 2012-13 to 70.84% in 2014-15 and hovered at 50% this year. Officials, however, point to a jump in employment in the second quarter. “This second quarter has posted the highest employment figures compared to the second quarters of past four years,” said Manash Ranjan, a consultant for the ministry of rural development. Prof. Himanshu, who tracks the MNREGA programme, said this could be misleading because during a drought, the number of job-seekers naturally jumps because of lack of farm work, as in 2009, when India faced its worst drought in three decades.
An official, requesting anonymity, said a key reason for delays appeared to be linked to decreased allocation. The budget for the scheme has seen a sharp decline, from ` 40,100 crore in 201011 to ` 33,000 crore in 2013-14. In the last fiscal, the NDA government marginally increased it to ` 34,000 crore. In the current year, this was raised slightly to ` 34,699 crore. If funds are available, another ` 5,000 crore could be added, finance minister Arun Jaitley had announced in his budget. Analysts point to two systemic problems that need a cure. “One, applications (from workers) often respond to available work, when it should be the other way round, i.e. work should be available whenever it is demanded. The second problem is of course payment delays,” an official said. “The worry is that the number two problem is now threatening to become number one,” he said.