India’s new government has apparently decided to restructure the United Progressive Alliance’s flagship anti-poverty programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The scheme confers the right to every rural household to be employed in public works for 100 days per year.
There are three reasons why the government wants to reform the NREGA. First, it is considered to be too expensive. Second, the programme is compromised by leakages and corruption. Third, the NREGA has supposedly failed to create durable assets.
The Minister for Rural Development, Nitish Gadkari, proposed to tackle these issues in three ways. First, to limit the NREGA to the 200 poorest districts in the country; second, to increase the amount of resources on the purchase of material and skilled labour from the current 40% of the total budget to 49% (thus reducing the amount of money that can be spent on wages, from the current 60% to 51%); third, to develop better monitoring mechanisms.
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