By IANS
New Delhi : Union Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh Friday defended the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) from criticism by the media and political leaders, taking a dig at Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, and said everyone should instead work to remove poverty from the country.
Singh, an important minister in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and a prominent leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Friday pooh-poohed Rahul Gandhi’s public speech made in Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh a day earlier, wherein he had said that the poor do not get what is sent by the central government.
Rahul Gandhi had referred to his father Rajiv Gandhi’s oft-quoted speech alleging that of the one rupee allocated by the government for the poor barely 15 paisa trickles down to them.
Singh was defending the NREG scheme against media criticism that it was a wasteful expenditure and suggestions that it either be scrapped altogether or modified substantially.
He said ever since the scheme, to guarantee 100 days work to the rural poor, had been launched, “anti-rural, anti-poor have become active. Some editorials have been written suggesting to scrap the scheme altogether, some political parties have asked for altering the scheme and someone is saying, ‘Father used to say only 15 paise reach the poor, not even five paise reach the poor’.”
He then sounded a conciliatory note, adding, “We all have to understand that we have to work together, political parties, the central government, the state governments, the district administration officials, the Block Development Officer (BDO) the sarpanch and the panchayats, to succeed in fully removing poverty from the country.”
He, however, reserved his most caustic comments for his political rival Janata Dal-United (JD-U) leader and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who had said the scheme was launched in a great hurry.
He said: “When the government of India launched the scheme only in 23 districts of Bihar, he (Kumar) announced that his government on its own had extended it to the rest of 15 districts also from the state funds. Now when he is finding it difficult to implement the scheme in its right spirit, he says we were in a hurry.”
Countering Nitish Kumar’s criticism, Singh said: “He says the scheme has flaws. Did he write to us even once pointing out any flaws? If the chief ministers will be so dismissive and non-serious about NREGS how will his officials implement it seriously?
The minister also chided his officers before the media for not getting their figures right. The note prepared had stated that against an allocation of Rs.780 billion, the Rural Development Ministry spent Rs.1.14 trillion. Singh, however, said the allocation was only Rs.760 billion and pulled up his officers for writing down incorrect figures.
Singh claimed that he planned to remove poverty from the country “by the end of the 11th Plan (2007-12) and towards the beginning of the 12th Plan through various schemes offering wage employment and self-employment to the rural poor and ensuring “at least one member each of a BPL family manages to earn a minimum of Rs.3,000 per month.”
For effectively implementing NREGS, trained and qualified people are being recruited by the states at the expense of the government.
Besides that he listed, “A total of 11,451 engineers, 2,565 data entry operators and 7,317 accountants have been recruited. Also 175,745 government functionaries and thousands of village monitoring committees have been trained at the cost of the central government to make the scheme as accountable and transparent as possible.”