The Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today said that the Government is committed to strengthen the rural jobs scheme MGNREGA and it has allocated Rs37,000 crore this fiscal, which is the highest ever budgetary support to the scheme. Addressing a MGNREGA Sammelan, organised to mark the completion of 10 years of the scheme, he said, government will boost the public spending in other rural sectors also like road, electrification, health, education and irrigation to spur the growth as private sector is not contributing to it as desired.
Allaying the apprehensions in some quarters that the scheme will be scrapped or will be replaced with some other scheme, Jaitley said, in coming years more funds will be provided to rural jobs scheme as this is basically a demand driven programme. He also underlined that this is the first year, where resources allocated in the budget for MGNREGA or other social sector schemes will not see any cut, as was the practice for the past several years to prune the planned expenditure affecting development. Jaitley said in the wake slowdown in global economy, India has to boost the public spending in rural sectors to economically empower the people to achieve targets.
In his address, the Minister for Rural Development, Birender Singh said that 2015-16 has seen a revival of the programme due to a slew of reforms undertaken by the Ministry of Rural Development. The person day generation is the highest in the second quarter and third quarter than it has been. Singh also informed that more than 64 per cent of total expenditure was on agriculture and allied activities and 57 per cent of all workers were women.
The Minister said, among the reforms responsible for revival of the scheme are the timely release of funds to states to provide work on demand, an electronic fund management system, consistent coordination between banks and post offices besides monitoring of pendency of payments.