Hindu
Business Line: New Delhi: Thursday, 09 October 2014.
The
Government is planning to roll back the rural job guarantee scheme, which will
end up affecting at least five crore rural households, social activists said
here on Wednesday.
Addressing a
press conference here, activist Aruna Roy said that the Government was
determined to ‘dilute’ the Act became evident after some material came to light
following an RTI reply by the Rural Development Ministry.
The changes
are being done at least in three significant ways by converting it into a
benami (nameless) contractor-driven programme, by changing the labour-material
ratio from 60:40 to 51:49, through rationing funds, despite it being a
demand-driven law, and by a move to restrict the coverage of the Act to
one-third of the blocks in the country, said Roy, who was once a member of the
National Advisory Council to the UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi.
“This would
effectively bring the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(MGNREGA) to an end,” said the People’s Movement for Employment Guarantee
(PMEG), which has written a letter to the Prime Minister, signed by about 200
activists.
According to
the RTI reply, Rural Development Minister Nitin Gadkari has ordered an amendment
in the schedule of MGNREGA “overriding the concerns of Ministry officials that
changing the material-labour ratio from 60:40 to 51:49 will result in a sharp
fall of 40 per cent in employment generated and “5 crore households will be
adversely affected by this decision”.
Economist
Prabhat Patnaik said, “this is one of the country’s most important programmes
that has not only enabled the rural workers to overcome conditions of acute
distress but has also helped protect rural India from the disastrous effects of
the last global economic collapse.”
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