Record payments under MGNREGS made this year by Centre

New Delhi, Dec 14: The Centre has made a record payment to workers enrolled in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in the first eight months of the current financial year.

The rural development ministry was allocated Rs 84,900 crore in two instalments to fund MGNREGS in the year ending in March 2021. Of this, the ministry spent Rs 76,800 crore in April-November. The amount spent in the same period last year was around Rs 50,000 crore.

The ministry has the highest expenditure rate among all Central government ministries, according to the Controller General of Accounts. The MGNREGS tracker that was released on Thursday said that the expenditure on the scheme was on account of 10 million more households getting work this year until November, a 243 per cent increase in person-days generated and higher wages paid to workers as compared to the previous year.

Till November end, an average household got 41.59 days of work when compared to the 48.4 last year and 50.88 in 2018-19. Only 1.9 million households got work for the 100 days mandated under the law when compared to 4.06 million last year. 210,000 were in Rajasthan and 350,000 in Andhra Pradesh, which also used their own funds to ensure that the NREGA workers received money on time. The number of households getting 100 days of work was the lowest in Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu.

"The data shows that there was surge for NREGA work demand due to pandemic and the government failed to meet the demand," the report also said.