Rahul questionS Pm Modi’s political wisdom On Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment

“The war of words comes against the backdrop of the Congress accusing the government of “appropriating” its icons” and “renaming” its schemes.

The Bharatiya Janata Party government has boosted spending under the MGNREGA jobs scheme to a record high and will for the first time release more funds than budgeted, finance minster Arun Jaitley said Tuesday.

“And the effect of this was that there was less spending and when there is less expenditure on economic development (and) cut in plan expenditure, it impacted economic growth”, he said.

Addressing a MGNREGA Sammelan organised to mark the completion of 10 years of the scheme, Jaitley said there were apprehensions that the NDA government would end or replace the scheme with a new programme. BJP has dubbed Congress claim over MGNREGA as baseless saying, “make in India” and “skill India” are far better schemes generating employment. “When a government scheme runs for many years, an attitude of indifference develops towards it. A kind of indifference towards it was growing by 2013-14 when the scheme has entered its seventh and eight years”.

Rejecting Government’s claim of having brought a “transformation” in NREGA, Congress today attacked it for praising UPA’s flagship rural job scheme in a “characteristic U-turn” and alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was eroding the effectiveness of the welfare effort.

“…but the Prime Minister of India has not understood this”, he said at a public meeting in this village in Ananthapur district, where then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi launched the programme a decade ago.

However, Modi govt has changed its tack all of a sudden and now it believes that the achievements of MGNREGA are a “cause of national pride and celebration”.

It was described as a landmark scheme in history that helped eliminating poverty from the nation. Singh said the “transformation (which happened) in last 18 months” of the NDA rule, “did not happen in last 10 years”. Therie asked the party workers to educate villagers on the number of days they should be getting to work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

There is a slowdown in economy in the World and there has been a negative growth rate and even export has weakened, ‘ he said.

Dey said 2015 was the worst year for the scheme.

“If you look at the global situation, there is slow growth”.

Noting that there is “some concern” in rural areas on whether MGNREGA would be scrapped, the Union Minister asserted that there is “no such possibility” and assured that the government would take forward the scheme without any laxity.

Jaitley said there are political, social and economic arguments behind putting funds in rural sector when it is stressed.