New Delhi: The average days of employment granted per household under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act for the current financial year is set to be lower than the last two years, The Hindu Business Line has reported. This report is based on official data released by the Union Ministry of Rural Development.
Until March 6, the average days of employment for household this fiscal was 45 – for the full year, The Hindu Business Line extrapolated, this could go up to 48. This is down from 50 in FY 2021-22 and 52 in FY 2020-21.
The law states that each rural household is entitled to 100 days of employment under the Act, but this has not been fulfilled in any year since when the scheme was enacted, in 2005. The scheme is supposed to be demand-driven.
The highest number of average employment days granted under the scheme was 54 in FY2010, followed by 52 in FY2020. The COVID-19 pandemic is said to have led to a spike in demand for work under the scheme, as many rural households found themselves without work and wages due to the shutdown, and migrant workers from urban areas went back to their villages.
The Hindu Business Line reports that the MGNREGA employment days generated is not evenly distributed across states: “The two extremes are two neighbours — Mizoram and Manipur. While in Mizoram, where 2.15 lakh households who sought work were provided with an average of 80 days of work, in Manipur, its NREGA worker population of 2.94 lakh people were provided just 18 days of work. The States that did better include Tripura (58 days), Kerala (57 days), Odisha and Rajasthan (53 days each). West Bengal (23 days), Goa (24 days), Haryana (29 days) and Assam (33 days) have fared quite badly.”
The NREGA Sangharsh Morcha had pointed out recently that workdays provided under the scheme had fallen significantly in January 2023 – “by 26% vis-à-vis January 2022, and 23% vis-à-vis average January
figures for the preceding four years”. This, they suggested, could be due to the complications coming from the digital
attendance system (NNMS App), which was made compulsory from January 1 this year. In Jharkhand, according to the Morcha, the app is barely in use – and that perhaps explains why workdays did not reduce in the state, but in fact increased. This could get worse, the Morcha said, since Aadhaar-based payments were being made mandatory under the scheme from February 1.
Rights activists had earlier also criticised the much lower budgetary allocation earmarked for the scheme for the upcoming financial year.