The Madras High Court today ordered issue of notice to officials, including Secretary, Union Rural Development Ministry, on a PIL seeking to declare section 6 of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (42 of 2005) as ultra vires of three articles of the Constitution.
The petitioner, A.Mahaboob Batcha, Managing Director of the Society for Community organisation, an NGO, said section 6 of the MNREGA empowered the central government to notify a wage rate on which labourers employed under the scheme are to be paid, notwithstanding the Minimum Wages Act.
It also empowered the state and central governments to extract work from the people for wages less than the minimum wages, he claimed.
While a person who worked under a private employer, extracting similar work, is entitled to be paid wages not less than those notified under the Minimum Wages Act, the state had been empowered to extract the same work for a remuneration which was less than the minimum wage, the petitioner claimed.
Section 6 suffered from excessive delegation of powers and was thus violative of three Articles of the Constitution-- 23 (forced labour), 14 (equality before law) and 16 (no citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, descent, place of birth, residence or any of them, be ineligible for or discriminated against).
The petitioner also sought an interim direction to pay wages to persons employed under MNREGA scheme throughout Tamil Nadu as per Section 3 of the Minium Wages Act, 1948.
A division Bench of Chief Justice S.K.Kaul and Justice V.Dhanpalan ordered issue of notice to officials including Union Secretary, Rural Development Ministry, Chairperson of the Central Employment Guarantee Council and Tamil Nadu Rural Development Secretary.
