Spotlight
New Delhi, 24 February 2007
FIRST ELEVEN MONTHS
OF NREGA
NEW DELHI, February 26 (INFA): As many as one
crore and thirty lakh people in 200 most backward districts in 27 States have
been provided employment under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(NREGA) during the first eleven months of its launch on February, 2006.
The NREG Act constitutes the first step towards realizing
the right to work as enshrined in the Directive Principles of State Policy in
the Constitution. Article 39 states that “the state shall, in particular,
direct its policy towards securing: “that the citizens, men and women equally,
have the right to an adequate means of livelihood.”
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act empowers
ordinary people to demand their constitutional right to work by placing a
corresponding duty on the State to implement that right.
As many as 43 per cent of those provided employment are
women. Among the beneficiaries, 45 per cent belong to Scheduled Castes and 32
per cent to Scheduled Tribes.
Two thousand five hundred lakh person days of employment has
been provided under the programme through execution of about 2 lakh 30 thousand
works of which almost half have been completed.
These works are predominantly for water and soil conservation,
forestation and land development, thus creating durable rural assets.
Fifty per cent of the works are implemented by gram
panchayats. Contractors and machinery are out of bounds from NREGA works, which
have to be labour intensive with 60 per cent funds being spent on wages alone.
Care has been taken to dispense with fears expressed from time to time about slippage of NREGA funds
or robbing the poor workers of their hard earned wages.
The Act allows for the public inspection of documents on
payment of a fee and regular social audits of the scheme’s implementation by
the gram sabha.
There is also provision for inspection of all works by block
level officials, 10 per cent of works by district level officers and two per
cent of works by State level officers.
Moreover, the Rural Development Ministry has been regularly
urging State authorities to set up local vigilance and monitoring committees. The
NIC has developed web-enabled MIS software for application from the village to
the Ministry level, which has been provided to all States before launching the
NREGA.
The monitoring initiatives by the Centre include 137
National Level Monitoring visits, 29 visits by Area officers, review meetings
and state specific reviews and field inspections, as well as independent professional studies.
The findings are being shared with States. Fund transfer is
being done directly to districts, which are expected to place required amounts
with gram panchayats and other implementing agencies. ---INFA
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