Building a Wider
Horizon With Labour
Last year, while replying to the debate on the motion of thanks to the President’s address in Lok Sabha, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme, a UPA legacy, was a living monument of poverty in the country. Since then, the Modi government has obviously done some re-think on the efficacy of this scheme since no one now refers to the scheme and poverty in the same breath. In fact, with the Budget Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presented on Monday entirely focused on reviving the rural economy though, it is no surprise that MNREGA is now the cynosure of all eyes. The allocation for MNREGA was the “highest ever” according to the FM at Rs 38,500 crore for 2016-17. This year the amount stood at Rs 36,967 crore.
