MGNREGA improved earnings during Covid-19, but more funding needed: Report

According to the 'Employment Guarantee during Covid-19' report, the spending on the MGNREGA needs to go up by three times

Despite its shortcomings, earnings from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) were able to compensate between 20 to 80 per cent of income loss for households during the Covid-19 lockdown, a latest report has revealed. Three out of five households surveyed said that the scheme contributed positively to overall development in their village. However, it requires more funding to reach its full potential.

The 'Employment Guarantee during Covid-19' report was released by Azim Premji University, the National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations on NREGA and Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD). It was based on surveys of eight blocks in four states of India namely Bihar, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh during November and December 2021.

MGNREGA guarantees 100 days of employment to every rural household that demands work.

"Covid pandemic lockdown created unprecedented distress and MGNREGA, as expected, rose to the need and provided work for many more villages and many more households than in the preceding years," Ashwini Kulkarni of the NREGA Consortium said.

More than eight in 10 households recommended that MGNREGA should provide employment for 100 days per person per year.

"In addition to taking a rights-based approach to employment provisioning, it includes several other innovative features such as equal pay for men and women, on-site child-care facilities, an attempt at grassroots democracy and participatory governance," the report said about MGNREGA.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour had earlier noted, "there is no better scheme than the MGNREGS to provide sustainable livelihood to the unskilled workers, including the inter-state migrant labours."

But despite Rs 1.11 trillion being spent on the programme in FY22, a large increase from the pre-Covid allocations of around Rs 60,000-70,000 crores, there is an immediate need to increase the budgetary allocation further to cover more people, said the report.

Nearly 39 per cent of all the job card-holding households, interested in working in MGNREGA in the coronavirus year, could not get a single day of work while they wanted 77 days of work on average, the study noted.

"A conservative estimate yields that the allocations in the surveyed blocks should have been three times the amount that was actually allocated in the year after lockdown to fulfil the true extent of work demand," Rajendran Narayanan, co-author of the study and faculty member at Azim Premji University said.

According to the MGNREGA Management Information System (MIS), the total amount spent on labour in the surveyed blocks in the Covid year (FY21) was Rs 152.68 crore. The report noted that to fulfil the true demand for work in these blocks, the allocated labour budget should have been Rs 474.27 crore.

It also recommended the government to increase the number of administrative personnel by at least doubling the number of field functionaries to deal with increased work demand.