June sees spike in households taking up NREGS work, poor monsoon one reason

Devendra Kumar Pant, Chief Economist, India Ratings, said the sharp increase in demand in June can be because of a weak monsoon, due to which kharif sowing was affected. Due to uneven rainfall distribution in June, sowing got delayed and hence people might have opted for NREGS, he said. With the rainfall deviation going down in July, the number is expected to decline, he told The Indian Express.

Pronab Sen, former Chief Statistician of India, said the jump can be due to two reasons; one, elevated rural unemployment that aggravated due to Covid-19, and timely release of funds by the Centre to states.

Sequentially too, the NREGS beneficiaries have increased since April this year. In April 2023, 2.07 crore families took to the scheme, and in May 2023, as many as 2.86 crore families availed of it.

Of the 3.03 crore families in June 2023, Tamil Nadu had the highest share of 17 per cent or 51.80 lakh families, followed by Andhra Pradesh 33.14 lakh, Rajasthan 32.68 lakh, Uttar Pradesh 32.10 lakh, and Bihar 22.36 lakh. In as many as 10 states, over a million families availed the scheme in June.

In absolute terms, the highest increase of 12.15 lakh was recorded in Tamil Nadu, 30.66 per cent more than 39.64 lakh in June 2022. In percentage terms, Chhattisgarh registered the maximum increase of 36 per cent, with 11.85 lakh families availing of the rural job scheme in June this year compared to 8.75 lakh in June last year.

In West Bengal, where work under MG-NREGS has been halted following suspension of funds from the Centre, only 962 families could get jobs under NREGS. In June 2022, as many as 4.94 lakh families had taken jobs under the scheme in the state.

In all, 4.15 crore families availed MG-NREGS across the country till July 16 in 2022-23. The government has allocated Rs 60,000 crore for NREGS in Budget 2023-24, of which almost two-third or Rs 39,659.99 crore has been spent till July 16, according to data available on the MG-NREGS dashboard.

In the three previous financial years, the total expenditure on the MG-NREGS had crossed Rs 1 lakh crore – Rs 1.01 lakh crore in 2022-23, Rs 1.06 lakh crore in 2021-22, and Rs 1.11 lakh crore in 2020-21.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act guarantees 100 days of wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. The scheme emerged as a safety net for poor and migrant workers who returned to their villages in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020-21, which witnessed the outbreak of Covid-19 and subsequent nationwide lockdown, the number of families availing the scheme hit an all-time high of 7.5 crore. It was 7.25 crore in 2021-22 and 6.18 crore in 2022-23.