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The government may earmark around Rs 90,000 crore for flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in the Budget estimate (BE) for 2024-25 (FY25), an increase of 50 per cent over the BE for FY24, in a strong signal to the poor ahead of approaching general elections.
Rampant misappropriation of funds allocated under the flagship scheme was one of the main triggers for the Centre to make a five-year-low provision of Rs 60,000 crore in the FY24BE for the rural jobs programme.
A likely higher upfront allocation for the jobs guarantee programme for FY25 means the government would largely stick to it through the year, without seeking supplementary grants, an official said.
While providing a lower allocation for the current fiscal, the Centre had promised more funds as and when required for MGNREGS, which is a demand-driven programme.
The scheme is intended to provide at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every household in rural areas of the country, whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.
As the funds provided for the current fiscal were exhausted by October, the Centre provided an extra allocation of Rs 16,143 crore in the first supplementary demand for grants in early December. It is likely to provide another Rs 12,000 crore for the flagship scheme in the revised estimate for the current fiscal in the Budget, taking the total outlay to around Rs 88,000 crore.
In the meantime, the Centre is taking various initiatives to plug leakages, which some estimates suggest could be around 30 per cent of the annual spending in the scheme. The Centre stopped disbursement of funds under the scheme to West Bengal due to corruption allegations.
From January 1, the government has made the Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS) mandatory for payment of wages. Under the ABPS, the Aadhaar of a worker is linked with her MGNREGS job card and bank account.
Direct benefit transfer (DBT) has saved an estimated 10 per cent on wages on account of the deletion of duplicate, fake/non-existent, and ineligible beneficiaries till March 2022.
So far in FY24, 2.45 billion person days of work have been generated and the number could touch 2.94 billion by March, the same as in FY23.
According to official data, month-wise work demand has moderated from 3.37 rore in June to 1.77 billion in November 2023. It rose marginally to 1.99 billion in December. With the Opposition political parties trying to make the demand for a caste census a hot potato ahead of general elections in April-May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently said that for him the poor, youth, women and farmers as the “biggest castes”, and uplifting of these four would make the country developed. fe
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