Why in news?
As tens of thousands of migrants returned to their villages following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the national lockdown that followed last year, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) emerged as a safety net for labourers in rural areas.
Over 11 crore people worked under the scheme during the financial year 2020-21 — the first time since its inception in 2006-07 that the MGNREGS numbers crossed the 11-crore mark in a year.
Fact Analysis
- Data available on April 1 show that 11.17 crore individuals availed the scheme in 2020-21, up 41.75 per cent from 7.88 crore in 2019-20.
- The total number of people, who availed the scheme, had been in the range of 6.21-7.88 crore between 2013-14 and 2019-20 — a period for which comparable data is available. But in the wake of job losses during the pandemic, an additional 3 crore plus people turned to the rural job scheme.
- According to the data, a record high of 7.54 crore rural households worked under the MGNREGS during 2020-21 — 37.59 per cent higher than 5.48 crore in 2019-20. The previous high of 5.5 crore was recorded in 2010-11.
- The numbers for individuals and households are likely to be revised upward once the muster roll data for the last week of March gets updated.
- Under the MGNREGS, every rural household, whose adult member volunteers to do unskilled manual work, is entitled to get at least 100 days of wage employment in a financial year.
- Launched in 200 most backward rural districts of the country in 2006-07, the scheme was extended to an additional 130 districts during 2007-08, and to the entire country 2008-09 onward.
- In 2020-21, the number of households that completed 100-day employment also reached an all-time high of 68.58 lakh, an increase of 68.91 per cent from 40.60 lakh in 2019-20.
- The average days of employment provided per household too went up marginally from 48.4 days in 2019-20 to 51.51 days in 2020-21.
- In all, 385.89 crore person days were generated in 2020-21, which is 45.43 per cent higher than 265.35 crore in 2019-20.
- In the pandemic year, the expenditure on MGNREGS also reached a new high. In 2020-21, the total expenditure was Rs 110,802.05 crore — 62.31 per cent higher than Rs 68,265.97 crore in 2019-20.
- As part of the economic package announced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the government declared additional funding of Rs 40,000 crore for the MGNREGS, over and above the Rs 61,500 crore allocated in the Union Budget 2020-21.