By IANS
New Delhi : Worried over failures in the government’s dream job guarantee scheme, Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi Thursday met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and urged him to take corrective measures.
Gandhi, accompanied by some of his young party colleagues, said they wanted “centralized monitoring and better coordination between the states” for a better implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).
“We met the prime minister to discuss about the NREGA and how it can be implemented better,” Gandhi told reporters after his 15-minute meeting with the prime minister at the latter’s parliament office.
Gandhi and Manmohan Singh also had a separate five-minute meeting.
Gandhi, accompanied by Milind Deora, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, Sandeep Dikshit and Tejaswini Ramesh, submitted a detailed memorandum with “7-8 points” to the prime minister.
“We have suggested that there should be centralized monitoring and better coordination between the states,” he said.
When pointed out the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has termed the scheme, one of the flagship programmes of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, a “failure”, the Amethi MP said: “It should not be lambasted. Some states are doing a very good job.”
According to the CAG report, 97 percent of rural households in India did not receive the 100 days of employment promised under NREGA.
Leaders of the Congress and its allies had hoped that the success of the scheme across rural India would fetch them electoral dividends in future elections.