MGNREGS helps migrants, workers during pandemic

Ongole: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) implemented in the Andhra Pradesh for 2020-21 proved to be a great employment provider to the workers and reverse migrants in the State. Though there are some important concerns over the implementation of the Employment Guarantee Scheme in the State, it has successfully crossed Rs 10,000 crore in expenditure for the first time.

The members of LibTech India Chakradhar Buddha, Anuradha De, Kowsalya Alla, Naveen Gajjalagari, Parul Saboo, Sbehal Sinha and Venkata Krishna Kagga prepared the report on MGNREGA in Andhra Pradesh 2020-21 with the information collected from the government sources. According to the report, there were 47.84 lakh job cards active out of 67.84 lakh job cards issued in AP and a total of 80.05 lakh workers actively attended the work in 2020-21. The government spent a total of Rs 10020.16 crore including Rs 5957.61 crore for the wages, Rs 3599.72 crore for the material and skilled wages, Rs 462.83 crore as contingent expenditure. This is 34.18 per cent more than the expenditure in 2019-20.

As the Covid pandemic hit the migrant workers very hard in 2020-21, almost all of them returned their villages. In 2020-21, a total of 446571 lakh new job cards are issued adding 7,29,121 workers to the force. As the processing of the job card applications was moved from mandal level to village level, village secretariats helped to accelerate the issue of new job cards.

In 2020-21, about 75 per cent of the total person days that is 19.46 crore person days were generated in the first four months. However, the average days of work for each household are just 54 days, though they are entitled to 100 days of work under the scheme. The women workforce dominates in the scheme for a long time. A similar trend is observed in the increase in the number of SC workers from 15.23 lakh in 2019-20 to 19.5 lakh 2020-21, and the number of ST workers from 6.8 lakh in 2019-20 to 7.7 lakh in 2020-21. The percentage of person days of SCs is slightly increased from 21.1 to 22.6 in 2020-21 while for the STs, it is reduced from 11.4 to 10.8. Though the scheme is greatly implemented to provide assets like Anganwadi buildings, secretariat offices, Raithu Bharosa Kendras, and other common utility structures, there were 36,392 transactions were rejected and suspended due to various reasons.