Jobs generated under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act have shown a dip after July, 2019 compared to 2018.
This comes even as 2018-19 saw a record number of households demanding as well as being provided employment under the program.
What is MGNREGA?
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is the largest work guarantee programme in the world.
It was enacted in 2005 with the primary objective of guaranteeing 100 days of wage employment per year to rural households.
It aims at addressing causes of chronic poverty through the projects that are undertaken, and thus ensuring sustainable development.
What do facts reveal?
Registered demand - In 2018-19, demand was registered from 5.88 crore households, and 5.27 crore of them were provided work.
These numbers were the highest in the last 5 years of the present government.
Dip in person-days - The person-days of work generated numbers rose from a mere 165.64 crore (2014-15) to 267.99 crore (2018-19).
However, 2019 has witnessed a clear dip in the person-days of employment under MGNREGA, which is visible after July.
Significantly, in all the months before, the work provided exceeded the corresponding levels for 2018.
According to government officials, the fall in MGNREGA employment after July has been largely due to the onset of the southwest monsoon.
Rainfall during the monsoon season (June-September) in 2019 was 10% above the historical long-term average - the highest since 1994.
An above-normal monsoon meant there was lower demand for MGNREGA work.
The fallin Supply - However, the gap between the number of households demanding MGNREGA work and the number who were provided work has been the highest in 2019-20.
This indicates that even if demand fell, supply of work fell even more.
What question does this trend raise?
The trends raise the question whether all this is linked to lack of funds.
The cost of providing a day’s work to a single person has been taken at an average of Rs 249.86 for 2019-20.
For 270.21 crore person-days of work that was approved, the MGNREGA labour budget for this fiscal worked out to roughly Rs 67,514.67 crore.
But for 2019-20, the government has allocated Rs 60,000 crore towards MGNREGA.
But out of this sum, around 16% would be required for clearing the liabilities of wages, material and administrative costs for previous years.
Meanwhile, the Centre has revised upwards its original plan of providing 260 crore person-days of work for 2019-20 to 316.73 crore person-days.
What are the other schemes witnessing a deceleration of activity?
PM-KISAN - The same deceleration that MGNREGA is witnessing now goes for the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi that was launched in December 2018.
Under this scheme, an income support of Rs.6000 per year is provided to all farmer families across the country in 3 equal instalments of Rs.2000 each every 4 months.
In the first instalment (December 2018 to March 2019), as many as 8.05 crore farmers were covered.
Those numbers fell to 7.43 crore in the second instalment and further to 5.91 crore in the third.
In all, the total amount disbursed under the scheme in 2019-20 is Rs 32,320.86 crore, which is significantly short of the Rs 75,000 crore budgeted for it.
PMAY-Gramin - The number of rural houses built under PM Awas Yojana-Gramin has seen a drop to just 7.2 lakh so far in 2019-20.
However, the process of registration, geo-tagging, etc has already started, and more houses may be built later in the year.
