MGNREGA violations an issue in TN villages, says new survey

CHENNAI: Institute of grassroots governance and Thannatchi on Tuesday released a report study on Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) from a survey conducted in 37 village panchayats of Tamil Nadu recently.

In the survey, it has been recommended to the government to improvise and provide beneficial schemes for the people.

It is noted that the village panchayats are not able to ensure 100 days of work to all families having active job cards.

"The field survey was conducted in 37 villages in the State, and it was identified that the training of stakeholders is ineffective, and there is a lack of training schedule because the newly-elected panchayat presidents are in dire need of MGNREGA training, which is required for the development of the scheme. Also, most of the stakeholders are unaware of the labour budget concept, even experienced village panchayat secretaries have no clue about the same," said M Prabhagaran, Institute of grassroots governance.

The fund allocation for the MGNREGA is sufficient only for about 20 days of salary. When the team visited Melanikuzhi Village Panchayat, Jayankondam Block of Ariyalur district, they came to know that the stakeholders were not aware of the projects and preparation of labour budget, Prabhagaran said.

"They were not at all involved in the planning process of MGNREGA in the past years. After the completion of data collection, the village panchayat requested the researchers to help them in preparing the labour budget for the current year 2023-2024," said R Vinoth Kumar of Thannatchi.

During the survey, it was noticed that female panchayat presidents were mere spectators and it was their spouse and male relatives in the family handling the survey responses. MGNREGS portal's username and passwords are not available with village panchayats and they are kept by officials at the block level.

In addition, the workers were not provided identity cards and the village panchayat authorities possesed the cards.

Meanwhile, in its report, Thannatchi stated that over 70,000 person days were approved by grama sabha for the current year, but only more than 24,000 person days were updated on MGNREGA portal for the year.

According to the data from the official website of MGNREGA, the average days of employment provided to households in the last four years had failed to meet its 100 days target. For the fiscal, 2022-2023 the average beneficiaries are 43. In 2021-2022 and 2020-2021, there were 50 beneficiaries and in 2019 – 2020 the average is 43 persons.