With its flagship rural job guarantee scheme going awry, the Union Rural Development Ministry has asked the States Governments to conduct a special drive to ensure that all the rural poor especially SC/ST households have job cards and work as per demand.
Sources said that in a recent meeting with the States, URD Minister Jairam Ramesh was livid that the Mahatama Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme was not taking off as desired which, he felt, could be tackled smoothly. Sources said that “an analysis of the percentage of SC/ST population with job cards against their participation in MGNREGA indicated that in all States except Kerala, Tamil Nadu and North-East States the percentage of their participation was very low”. The Minister also felt that works on land of SC/ST households need to be taken on priority basis.
Not only the SC/ST category, even the participation of women in many States was less than 33 per cent, it was noted.
At the end of the meeting “It was decided that the Helpline number will be printed on the job cards and Panchayat Bhawan in regional language and English. In case of existing job cards, stickers with the numbers would be pasted,” the sources added.
It was also noted that average person days per household in the current financial year (till September 9, 2013) was lower than the national average (28) in MP, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Haryana, HP, Odisha, UP, West Bengal, Mizoram and Tripura.
Similarly, district-wise physical progress of the UPA’s flagship scheme was not very encouraging for the year 2013-14. “The actual labour demand was below 50 per cent in many districts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand Karnataka, MP, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Maharashtra, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu Kashmir, Kerala, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, UP, West Bengal and Nagaland,” the sources said.