The Central government led by the BJP seems to have decided to have done away with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) slowly going by its decisions.
The Centre has slashed Rs 25,000 crore for the scheme in the present budget. It has stalled payment of wages on some or other pretext and Telangana state alone is due to get Rs 14,000 crore.
Now, it was decided to allocate only 20 works under the scheme to each village and permission will be given for the second work only after completion of the first work. The officials should upload photographs twice in the day – morning and afternoon.
The Centre has developed new software that makes it cumbersome to release funds unlike in the past. It comes up with many hassles and deprives lakhs of rural poor of their wage employment.
In Telangana state, there are 12,769 Gram Panchayats in which 5.82 lakh worlds were underway engaging 1.50 lakh rural poor
Of them 96,710 works were completed. The state has about 50 lakh job cards, however, certain works will be done by specially skilled people. Others have to wait for their turn.
Now central government deciding to scale down number of works, many lose their wage employment opportunity.
Not only these, but the central government has made several changes to the scheme – in the past, there was a provision for having a tent and drinking water. Now it was done away with.
There would be no additional work in summer which was there in the past. The Centre objects to digging up trenches in forest areas aimed at helping the tribals get wage employment. It also objects to the desilting of village tanks under the MNREGS.
By Gollapudi Srinivasa Rao