Demand for MG-NREGA work growing, additional budget needed | Bharat Dogra

The coordinator of Mahila Sangathan (women’s organization) in Barmer district, Anita Soni, said recently that there is increasing demand for employment under the rural employment guarantee scheme known popularly as MG—NREGA.

In this district of Rajasthan a recent group meeting in Taaratara village raised the demand for work under NREGA. Nathu Devi said that NREGA by making available employment in or near village is life-sustaining (sanjivani) for us. In addition, she stated, this gives us the opportunity to meet our friends (sahelis) living in different hamlets and remain with them for extended time.

In Jind (Haryana) on January 9 MG-NREGA workers (together with some other workers) held a protest demonstration and submitted a charter of demands to officials. They alleged that despite demanding work in proper ways under NREGA they are not getting work, or else get negligible employment. Their wages are not given in time, and have sometimes been delayed for a long time. Other provisions of the employment guarantee law are also not being implemented properly.

These are only two examples of the scenes being enacted in many parts of the country as workers’ expectations from the MG-NREGA law are not being fulfilled, and they need more work on better terms.

As per recent reports, work demand under MG-NREGA increased for the second consecutive month in December 2024. About 25.8 million villagers sought work, which is a significant 7.4 per cent rise from the previous year 2023.

It has been a frequent complaint of social activists monitoring the progress of this law that due to less than adequate allocations in the original budget, the funds are depleted much before the financial year ends and there is need for significant additional allocations during the later months. If adequate additions are not made, problems tend to increase around this time of the year.

Hence the government should make a careful assessment of the need for additional funds and make these available generously as the protection of the poorest sections and women of rural areas are involved here.

Moreover even in more normal times this writer has found in the course of visits to several remote villages that many important provisions of the law are not observed at the implementation level, and it is not being implemented in the true spirit of genuine rural employment guarantee. Employment generated is often too less compared to need, and payment to wages is often delayed. This leads to the poorest sections losing faith in the ability of the law and its scheme to protect them and losing this faith they migrate to cities no matter how great the difficulties in this migratory work. Once they migrate then in any case the possibilities of this law helping the poorest declines, although still better implementation can at least help those who are still in village, particularly women.

Despite this sometimes one still comes across examples of good, useful work being done under this law, and this is likely to happen more when some sincere officials are taking up some work they consider to be very important, or else when together with sincere officials sincere voluntary organizations or social activists are also working to improve the implementation. On the whole, however, the law and its scheme are working much below their potential and in the process those who suffer the most are the poorest.

Hence while there is need to increase financial allocations for MG-NREGA, at the same time the rural development ministry must make much more effort for improving implementation at several levels. The ministry is supposed to have several monitoring mechanisms in place to know the reality and take corrective actions on this basis, and so it is surprising that overdue corrections have not been made yet. If even delayed corrective actions are taken now, then these can still bring significant relief to the most vulnerable sections of rural society. In particular at high priority level attention should be focused on those parts of the country which have suffered from disasters like destructive floods (regions like north Bihar) so that at least in these regions the implementation of NREGA can improve very significantly.

(Author: Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include India’s Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food, Man over Machine, Protecting Earth for Children and A Day in 2071)