Pregnant women working under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) will get motherhood allowance in the form of maternity leave. Guidelines in this regard have been issued to all district programme coordinators and collectors from Mantralaya here on Monday.
last month, the panchayat and rural development department had issued circular to all district programme coordinators and collectors to provide ‘Motherhood Allowance’ equal to one month wages to card-holder pregnant women working under MNREGA during the maternity leave period for improvement of their health and for delivery of healthy baby.
The motherhood allowance scheme is Chhattisgarh government’s own scheme and for that money would be released from the state fund to the district. For this money, each Janpad Panchayat and District Panchayat would open separate account in any commercial bank and would maintain separate cash book also.
In each village panchayat, separate register would be maintained for application received for motherhood allowance. The village panchayat secretary, after examination of the application, will submit it to the Sarpanch within the prescribed time limit for sanction of the amount as per the rule.
The Sarpanch will issue sanction/rejection order in the case and will inform the applicant and the chief executive officer Janpad Panchayat accordingly. If the application was rejected, clear reason should be mentioned in the order. On receiving the sanction order from the village panchayat, the CEO Janpad Panchayat will deposit the money to the account of the applicant within three days positively and will inform the applicant accordingly.
Through the circular, the department has directed the collectors to ensure wide publicity of the scheme and to review the progress of the scheme on occasions at district level so that more and more beneficiary might get the benefit of the scheme.