New Delhi: While Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman gave the miss to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in her speech while presenting the Union Budget 2024 in parliament today, the new Narendra Modi government has allocated Rs 86,000 crore to the scheme.
This is the highest ever initial Budget Estimate allocation to the 100-day work scheme by the National Democratic Alliance government, which has at once been keen to phase United Progressive Alliance-era guarantee out. While Revised Estimates of spending have invariably been more, the government has been allocating far less through the years.
Rs 86,000 crore may be the exact amount that the government quoted in its Revised Estimates for the financial year 2024 – an amount that was Rs 26,000 crores above its Budget Estimate of Rs 60,000 crore – but it is less than what was actually spent on the demand-driven scheme, now a right, in FY 2023. Rs 98,000 crore was spend on the scheme in FY’23.
This has implications as being a demand-driven scheme, a rise in demand for MNREGA is an important index of economic distress being faced by the most vulnerable.
The Economic Survey for FY’24, released a day ago, had sought to play down the role of people’s distress in the perpetual demand for jobs under the United Progressive Alliance-era scheme.
As is visible above, the scheme played a major role in the post-COVID crisis of jobs.
Activist Nikhil Dey told The Wire, “It is not surprising that the programme doesn’t even find a mention in the finance minister’s speech. It has remained a starved programme and therefore has not been able to do what it can do.”
Though the government has been saying that the demand for the programme has gone down, he contradicted, saying, “During the Covid years, its demand had certainly soared. Though that demand has come down in the subsequent years, but it has not gone back to the pre Covid years.”
The amount allocated for the programme this financial year is Rs 86000 crores, the same as pledged by the government in the 2023 budget. However, the revised budget shot up to over Rs 1.20 lakh crore.
Dey, who had worked to implement the programme during the Congress era, added, “Year after year, it is the same story. Money is typically squeezed; it never takes inflation into account before allocating the funds.”
Visualisation by Soumashree Sarkar.
