New Delhi: The government has laid out two key priority moves for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) over the next five years, linking it with skill development and eliminating delays in wages reaching beneficiaries.
MGNREGA, which promises 100 days of employment every year to each rural household, is implemented by the Ministry of Rural Development, and has a current budgetary allocation of Rs 60,000 crore.
“We have set priority under MGNREGA to ensure greater emphasis on skilling in the scheme in a way that workers who seek jobs under the scheme also move up the skill ladder,” a senior ministry official who did not wish to be identified told ThePrint.
The skilling plan
While MGNREGA was designed as a scheme to provide work to “any household residing in any rural area and willing to do unskilled manual work”, one of its biggest criticisms has been its inability to add any productive value to beneficiaries.
To address this, while the ministry has already been making efforts to integrate skill development and capacity-building with the scheme by converging it with various programmes, including the National Rural Livelihoods Mission, it plans to do this on war-footing for the next five years.
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“We have to ensure some additional, basic skills are imparted to MGNREGA beneficiaries, in the area of agriculture for example, so they can do something of their own. This will be taken up in a big way now, as one of the main priorities,” the official said.
