write about Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005
Answers
MGNREGA was orginally called NREGA which stands for National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The Congress government added “MG” (Mahatma Gandhi) to it.
What is it?
MGNREGA is a social security employment act which guarantees employment to the poorest people in India. The way the identify these regions is by narrowing down to the the poorest districts in India. The agenda is to provide 100 days of employment to all adults in the chosen districts to do unskilled manual work.
What kind of work do they allocate to the applicants?
Each applicant apparently gets allocated work within the same area to build roads, ponds, wells etc. Labour-intensive tasks like creating infrastructure for water harvesting, drought relief and flood control are preferred. Basically villagers had to do work which is not economically productive or so it seems by the nature and organization of it.
Who is authorized to implement it?
It is to be implemented by only Gram Panchayats and no private bodies like contractors are to be involved.
Who’s idea was it?
Ever since independence, every government’s agenda is to involve the rural population of India into the overall national progress. Since 1960, there were several schemes which were predecessors to the MGNREGA scheme. Governments’ have experimented with this social security compulsory employment in many ways.
Is it useful?
From the corrupt officials perspective, it is useful because there is a lot of corruption reported in the implementation of the scheme. Of course, why wouldn’t there be as thousands of crores per year is allocated to this scheme. From a society’s perspective, it is not useful because unskilled laborers are being given money for free which is in turn spent on things like alcohol or other wasteful expenditure. With that kind of budget, the government can pump it back into PSU ventures and set up educational institutions, labour oriented factories etc. But alas, year after year, money gets poured into this scheme. According to news sources, less than 30% of tohe payments were actually made to jobless villagers.
My opinion:
MGNREGA should be scrapped and the money should be put to better use. Now there are many different ways that money can be used. Best to end it here :-)
Hope this helps.
(i) It guarantees 100 days of wage employment in a financial year to a rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. One-third of the proposed jobs would be reserved for women.
(ii) The scheme will initially be started in 200 districts. Later on, the scheme will be extended to 600 districts.
(iii) If an applicant is not provided employment within 15 days, she/he will be entitled to a daily unemployment allowance.