Opinion New job guarantee Bill needed greater debate, legislative oversight
MGNREGA provides wage employment to nearly 6 crore rural households for an average of 50 days a year. That the government chose not to refer the VB-G RAM G Bill to a parliamentary committee is inexplicable
The MGNREGA was the flagship programme of the previous Congress-led UPA regime. But the Modi government can take credit for streamlining it to ensure that the money spent reached the intended beneficiaries. Neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, were present — both were abroad — when the VB-G RAM G Bill was passed last week in Parliament by voice vote. The Modi government didn’t deem it necessary to send the Bill, which repeals and replaces the two-decade-old MGNREGA, to a standing committee for detailed scrutiny and for inviting public/expert opinions before its final passage. Why it did not, while referring two other bills (one to establish an apex regulatory body for higher education and the other to enact a unified Securities Market Code) to the concerned House committees, is inexplicable. Given that the MGNREGA provides wage employment to nearly 6 crore rural households for an average of 50 days a year, any law seeking to scrap or overhaul it is surely worthy of informed debate and deliberation. What was the tearing hurry to push through the Bill?
The MGNREGA was the flagship programme of the previous Congress-led UPA regime. But the Modi government can take credit for streamlining it to ensure that the money spent reached the intended beneficiaries, whether through seeding their Aadhaar-linked bank accounts with the NREGASoft MIS platform or geo-tagging of the assets created. During the Covid years of 2020-21 and 2021-22, the MGNREGA generated 389.09 crore and 363.19 crore person-days of employment, with the total households working, too, reaching a record 7.55 crore and 7.25 crore respectively. The scheme, thus, delivered most when it mattered — and under the present government. Also, unlike, say, the farm laws, this is a programme that has lent itself to bipartisan support. Any proposed legislation to reform or improve it would have encountered little political rift. By steamrolling the VB-G RAM G Bill through both Houses, the Modi government has repeated its mistake vis-à-vis the farm bills — they were also not referred to the parliamentary standing committee.
The Bill that has been passed has provisions that constitute significant departures from the MGNREGA. The latter was demand-driven and could be availed by any household whose members sought to do manual work for up to 100 days a year, with the Centre footing the entire wage bill and three-fourths of the material cost. But now, the Centre will determine the “normative allocation” of funds for each state, making it a supply-from-above rather than a demand-from-below scheme. The Centre deciding how much each state gets also opens up the possibility of playing favourites based on political calculations. Further, the Centre will cover only 60 per cent of the scheme’s cost, putting an additional burden on already fiscally constrained states. All these are serious issues that deserved more public consultation and greater legislative oversight.
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