Context:

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has been one of the main avenues for the Centre to provide employment to returning migrants and others in rural areas who have been rendered jobless due to the lockdown.

The current situation of MGNREGA in times of COVID-19

• MGNREGA continues to attract rural labourers pushed into distress due to the Covid-19 crisis triggering calls for increasing the mandatory workdays to 200 and raising the minimum wages under the scheme to Rs 600 per day.
• Data sourced from the MGNREGA website shows that in June 2020 around 43.7 million households sought work under the scheme that was the highest in last seven years, maintaining a trend seen in May as well.
• The surge in work demanded under the scheme comes after more than 20 million migrants returned to villages from the cities to avoid COVID-19 lockdown announced in March.
• To provide more work to the migrant laborers, the Central government in May raised the budget under the scheme by Rs 40,000 crore for 2020-21, taking the full year allocation for the scheme to over Rs 100,000 crore for the first time ever.
• The additional funds is meant to generate additional 0.2 billion person-days of work in 2020-21 over and above the budgeted 2.8 billion person-days.

Mandate of Mahatma Gandhi Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (MGNREGA)

• The mandate of the MGNREGA is to enhance livelihood security in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of wage employment in a fi nancial year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

Problems facing MGNREGA

• Low wage rate
• Insufficient budget allocation.
• Regular payment delays
• Workers penalised for administrative lapses
• The banking puzzle
• Faulty MIS data
• Non-payment of unemployment allowance
• Genuine job cards being deleted to meet 100% DBT targets.