The highest allocation since its launch!
We are all likely to forget or even if we know, at least some of the experts and others might know that on Februray 27 2015 the Prime Minister Mr.Modi in a speech delivered in Parliament had described the scheme s a living example of great failure!
Yes, that is how politics is conducted in the country, though we have to give credit to Mr.Modi for having displaced the Congress party that had been then had become a coterie of corruption presided by a well-rated economic expert!
What went wrong that sent out a powerful signal to the people to vote the mighty party out?
What else but simple act of isolation and no one in the then Congress party, why even now, after three years of such a monumental defeat the party hadn’t recovered from its slumber or arrogance of such magnitude?
Anyway, the much over-rated or maligned MGNREGA has been now taken up by the successor government s inevitable. According to experts like Prof.Ashok Gulati who had studied the scheme it seems that in terms of the price rise and other factors that had been taken into account that the allocations is not a sort of rise but a decline in value.
Measured in real terms at the 2011-12 prices, the expenditure is a decline. Says the experts that measured in current prices, the budgeted expenditure in FY 15, it has actually been declining.
Fine. The real question is whether the much touted scheme, why even credited to the now discredited National Advisory Council over which Sonia Gandhi presided over with such fanfare, is it a mere dole scheme, to disburse funds freely for the poor as a populist election appeal or was if functioning as a development -oriented well-thought out scheme?
We who are living far away from Delhi and the outside of New Delhi’s comfort zone of Lutyen’s bungalow zone, the scheme is a hazily conceived scheme to win the successive elections in a populist fashion, very much like the other schemes, very much like AIADMK schemes, so many to count here, anything and everything that catches the fancy of the poor, from almost subsidised low-cost meals to what have you (if readers permist, we also cite the kio-ends like Tasmac liquor shops to even corruption currency notes at the time of elections!) all that go win an election!
Yes, that was also one such scheme, we mean the much over-rated MGNREGA which was in many parts a laughing stock even with the poor and the villagers. The scheme led to a sudden shortage of farm labour and to that extent it led to a depression in agriculture activities.
We in this very medi pointed out many times that it would have been a welfare scheme for rural farm labour if it had been tagged with farm labour employment.
The cost of agriculture production activities might have been kept under watch but no one paid any attention. So the scheme in many parts, we were eye witness to such farce as sending the labour out in the roadside activates where the labour simple idled for the time allotted and ended up with no sustained production activities whatever!
Nor as now pointed out by experts in retrospect that the scheme must be redesigned in consultation with the Panchayat Raj activities. That would serve some direct benefits like conservation, sanitation, lake formation etc.
Even now, the implementation of the MGNREGA must be recast in the light of the experience gained under the empty populism of the Congress regime.
A decentralised planning and supervision a much transparent spending of the funds that is by account very huge and so much benefit the maximum reach and benefit. The scheme is a good one and from experience it is better to improve and improvise rather than take any partisan view of things.
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