As rural distress has "risen to alarming levels", activists have described the cut in allocation for the rural job guarantee scheme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGA) as a "telling and obviously callous" move by the government, which has displayed a “total lack of responsibility and sensitivity”.
Noting that wage rates of MGNREGA are lower than minimum wages in most states, they demanded that the minimum allocation required to implement MGNREGA should be no less than Rs 1 lakh crore while saying that the reduction in the allocation was an "insult" to the law, towards which the government has a duty to implement.
Activists under the banner Peoples' Action for Employment Guarantee, which includes Nikhil Dey, Annie Raja, Rajendran Narayanan and Rakshita Swamy, said the decrease in allocation for MGNREGA is a "serious concern" when coupled with the rising unemployment levels in rural India as depicted by the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) and double-digit food inflation levels.
"No less can be expected from a government led by a Prime Minister who in the Parliament vowed to keep MGNREGA alive only to prove it as a testament of failure," activists said in a joint statement, adding that it showed a "clear indication" of the government's lack of priority towards the marginalised.
The Budget estimate for 2020-21 for MNREGA is Rs 61,500 crore, which is around Rs 10,000 crore less than the revised estimate of 2019-20.
"The situation is much worse for the landless depending on casual manual labour who constitute more than half the rural population. On ranking the rural population from the poorest to the richest, and dividing them into 10 groups, the Monthly Per Capita Consumption Expenditure (MPCE) has fallen for every group. What this means is that the entire cross section of rural India has become poorer," they said in a statement.
"The reduction in the budgetary allocation is taking place when the minimum allocation needed to protect the MGNREGA as status quo is nearly Rs 85,927 crore. This in itself is a suppressed figure," they said adding this calculation does not include the amount of pending liability that might be due at the end of this year for wages, material and administrative cost among others.