New Delhi: For the second consecutive budget speech, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has skipped mention of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme – the world’s largest job guarantee programme and a consistent source of income for the rural unemployed.
The Narendra Modi government has allocated Rs 86,000 crore to the scheme – the same amount as what was spent on the scheme as per the Revised Estimate of 2024-2025. Rs 86,000 crore is also the exact amount that was promised in the Union Budget of 2024-25, presented in July, 2024, after the National Democratic Government came to power.
Rs 86,000 crore is less than what was spent on the scheme – which is a right under the MGNREGA – in 2023-24, Rs 89,154 crore.
In a pre-budget video for The Wire, social activist Anuradha Talwar had said that the challenges facing the MGNREGS, from digital exclusion to budget cuts, have left workers unpaid. “MGNREGA is essential for the economy, and the government shouldn’t use it in opportunistic ways,” she had said.
The United Progressive Alliance-era scheme has often been the site of the Modi government’s drive to play down rural distress. However, it has played a major role in the post-COVID crisis of jobs. Reports have noted how demand for work under the rural jobs programme fell in 2023-24, compared to the peak of COVID, but was still 15% more than the average demand between 2014-15 and 2018-19.
The 2023-24 Lok Sabha Standing Committee’s February 2024 report on Rural Employment through the MGNREGA said that the reduction to the scheme in budgetary allocation in 2023-24 was “puzzling and needs to be looked into”.
In 2015, Modi had called MGNREGS a “living monument to the opposition’s failures.”
