Haryana Deputy Chief Minister, Dushyant Chautala on Saturday asked the Central Government to immediately lift the ban imposed by the National Green Tribunal on the operation of brick kilns in the National Capital Region (NCR).
During the nationwide lockdown period, the environment in NCR has become largely clean and over 57 percent of Haryana's area falls under the NCR region, he said.
Chautala made this demand in a meeting presided over by Union Rural Development Minister Narendra Singh Tomar from New Delhi held with the Rural Development Ministers of the States through video conferencing.
He also demanded that the Central Government should make the Aadhaar Card data available to the state through APIs to prevent double entries in wages being paid under the MGNREGA so that the state can check and remove duplicate beneficiary accounts from its database.
The Deputy Chief Minister pointed out that during the nationwide lockdown period, there was a shortage of labour in every sector and a large number of migrant workers had migrated to their native states. Therefore, MGNREGA labourers should be allowed to engage in agricultural work, whether it was harvesting, loading-unloading in mandis or storing in godowns. He also said that a letter had been written to the Central Government on behalf of Haryana in this regard. If the farmers wished, they could pay wages to MGNREGA workers on their own.