MNREGA scheme faces host of problems

 Hyderabad: The Centre has reduced the number of person days for the 2018-19 financial year as it has lagged behind in achieving targets of previous financial year. The person days of the State has been reduced to 10 crore from 12 crore of last year, resulting in a loss of 2 crore person days. This would reduce works to the job seekers. 

The State has been given 12 crore person days in the 2017-18 financial year and it has provided 11 crore person days to the job seekers till end of March. The achievement of the target has stood at 93 per cent. Centre has allocated Rs 2,957 crore and the State utilised the funds of about Rs 2,539 crore. 

With this, the Centre has reduced the number of person days for the present financial year. Unless the State steps up efforts to achieve the targets, the reduction in person days would continue, activists of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) programme said. 

Telangana Agriculture Workers Union president B Prasad said that the officials and the staff of NREGA scheme have been indulging in irregularities and neglecting the implementation. As the State government is not strictly supervising the implementation, the staff has been behaving in reckless manner. 

He said that the number of job seekers was coming down year by year as they have been insulted by the staff, post office officials and bank employees. He said that the payments to the workers were not made regularly and some have dues for about one year.  Prasad said that the post offices have been lacking the staff and they were unable to make the payments. The bankers have been refusing to give money to NREGA staff to make payments in cash. 

Technical glitches in the software being used to generate job cards, accounts and others have also been hampering the payments to the workers weeks together and this was discouraging the unskilled person from taking up the works.  According to activists of the scheme, NREGA suffers from many other serious problems. 

Participation of gram panchayats in the programme has decreased substantially due to the excessive centralisation of implementation. Many workers are unable to receive their wages due to the forced integration of the programme with Aadhaar. 

There is rampant violation of workers’ rights towards worksite facilities, unemployment allowance and time-bound redressal of grievances. Accountability and transparency provisions of the Act are ignored by the Central and State governments. Over the time, this has created a climate of impunity and immunity around NREGA that anyone can get away with anything.