MGNREGA has come to haunt PM on his monumental failure

New Delhi: After Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi wrote article on MGNREGA saying it's not about the BJP or the Congress which initiated this scheme, demanding that NGNREGA must be scaled up and made open-ended to meet the massively increased demand, the Congress targeted the Prime Minister for making fun of this scheme.

Abhishek Singhvi, senior spokesperson of the Congress, addressing a press conference here said, PM's words have come back to haunt him. Covid-19 marks PM Modi ki 'vifalta ka jeeta jagta samarak'.

As Covid-19 has demonstrated the unmatched value of a people-centric scheme like MGNREGA with a humbled Modi Government being constrained to commit an additional Rs 40,000 crore, he said.

The unfortunate Covid-19 crisis has forced the Modi Government to concede that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 2005, is the most effective and far-reaching tool to tackle the economic challenges being thrown up. In May 2020 alone, 2.19 crore households demanded work through the Act, the highest for the month in eight years.

"Prime Minister Modi famously criticised MGNREGA on the floor of Parliament in 2014 calling it "a living monument of the INC's failure".