Limit of mandays under MGNREGA extended to 31 cr for current fiscal
Kolkata: With the state government setting up a milestone in creating mandays under MGNREGA scheme, the limit for Bengal to create mandays in 2020-21 fiscal has been increased to 31 crore.
This comes when the Bengal government has successful in creating 27.22 crore mandays only in the seven months of the current fiscal. The
total mandays created in the entire 2019-20 fiscal was 27.23 crore. The data shows that
the entire financial year's mandays creation of 2019-20 has been covered only in seven months of this fiscal. This includes lakhs of migrant workers those returned to Bengal after losing jobs in other states due to the nationwide lockdown.
Most importantly, as per calculation till date the
average wage rate per day per person has gone up to Rs 192.19 in 2020-21 fiscal compared to that of Rs 178.62 in 2019-20.
With the state's success rate of implementing the scheme, the increased limit of 31 crore mandays has been approved by the Centre. Initially in this fiscal the Centre had reduced the allocation of the total number of mandays to 22 crore for Bengal that usually remain 28 crore every year. But with
the record mandays creation in the state, now the same has been increased to 31 crore mandays.
However, there will be no bar in creating if the state
creates more mandays than
31 crore till the end of this fiscal.
The state Panchayat and Rural Development department has taken all sorts of measures to ensure that the rural populace get the work under the 100-days job scheme at the critical time of Covid that led to nationwide lockdown.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took stock of the implementation of the scheme at every administrative meeting. Following direction of the Chief Minister, the
state Panchayat minister Subrata Mukherjee and the department's additional chief secretary MV Rao often held
video conferences with district authorities to ensure proper implementation of the same.
It is the people from scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities who have carried out 28.09 percent and 8.53 percent of the total mandays created so far in the current fiscal. Similarly, the state
government has become successful in providing 44.73 percent of the mandays to women in the past seven months. It needs a mention that the women person days out of the total job creation in 2019-20 fiscal was 47.86 in the entire year.
When contacted, the state Panchayat minister Subrata Mukherjee said: "We have almost touched the 31 crore mark and every day lakhs of mandays are getting created in the state. There will be no bar if we can create more mandays as now the priority is being given to provide jobs to migrant workers."
