BJP MP Varun Gandhi on Friday said MNREGA, a scheme from the UPA era which guarantees employment in the rural areas, was a "good policy".
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had once called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) scheme a "living monument of UPA's failure" to tackle poverty.
"I actually support MNREGA. I think it is a good policy. It is a misconception to say that the scheme is a failure," Gandhi said, addressing students of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A).
The Sultanpur MP was invited by the institute to speak on issues he had written about in his upcoming book 'A Rural Manifesto: Realising India's Future Through Her Villages'.
Gandhi said villagers should be given the power to decide what kind of work they wanted in the villages under MNREGA.
He said instead of focusing on "next elections", he would prefer to think about "next generation".
Gandhi also said that looking at the backgrounds of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) Officers, it was clear that privilege has played a major role in their success.
"As per the information I received through a query under the Right To Information, 69 per cent of serving IAS officers have been to private schools, 84 per cent of them have grown up in 25 big cities and 70 per cent have a post-graduate degree which is a luxury," he said.
Out of 15.5 lakh schools in the country, only 1.2 per cent are affiliated to "posh boards" such as CBSE or ICSE, while only 8 per cent students who got admission to the IITs in 2015-16 were from schools affiliated to state boards, he said.