By IANS
New Delhi : The income of daily-wage workers has more than doubled in the northeastern region and has increased considerably in other states since the introduction of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) two years ago, Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh said Friday.
“Our Left friends have been agitating for decent and reasonable minimum wages. But what they failed to achieve through their agitation, we have achieved through NREGA,” Singh said here.
“Before the introduction of the scheme, the minimum wages for a daily wage earner was Rs.40 there and now it has gone up to Rs.100 per day,” the minister said.
The rural development ministry spent Rs.80 billion on NREGS in the last financial year. This year, though another two months are left for the fiscal to end, Singh said Rs.105 billion had been dispatched, “of which Rs.90 billion has already been spent”.
In the first year of its launch, the scheme was restricted to 200 districts. Another 13 were included last year. The NREGS is to be implemented in all districts of India from April 1.
Singh said that the scheme had also helped in improving gender equity.
“At the national level, the women’s ratio in work force participation under NREGA is 44 percent as against 33 percent earmarked for women under the act,” he said.
“Although the programme is not confined to BPL (below poverty line) families, experience in almost all states is that most BPL families have been able to demand employment under NREGA. At the national level, the demand for employment is 157 percent. It is near 100 percent or more in most of the states.”
According to Singh, field reports have yielded nascent evidence of reduction in distress migration especially in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Orissa.
Apart from an increased awareness among workforce about minimum wages and task rates, an increase in wage earnings has been reported from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, the minister said.
In the process, “the main assets created by the scheme are in the area of water conservation”, Singh said.
These include water harvesting, flood control and protection; micro-irrigation works, renovation of traditional water bodies, drought proofing and rural connectivity.