Barring the pandemic years, nine states across the country, including three in the southern region with Tamil Nadu being on top, saw the highest demand for work in over 10 years this monsoon under the Centre’s flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), as per an analysis of government data shared in Parliament.
According to the data, August saw the highest demand for work under the scheme across the country since 2014-15, except for the pandemic years (2020-21, 2021-22), with nine states – Tamil Nadu (5.32 crore), Karnataka (1.33 crore) Kerala (1.29 crore), Uttar Pradesh (UP) (3.20 crore) Jharkhand (1.04 crore), Assam (1.04 crore), Madhya Pradesh (MP) (1.44 crore), Odisha (1.40 crore) and Rajasthan (2.44 crore) – recording the highest number of person-days generated in the month.
The person-days recorded in southern states, which have a high per-capita income, is much higher than the low-income and more populous states such as UP, MP, Odisha and Jharkhand, among others. Activist groups working closely with the scheme said that this could be mainly because of erratic and untimely rains during the monsoon in these states disrupting rural employment.
Person-days under the scheme is defined as the total number of work days by a person registered under the scheme in a financial year.
While the Union Ministry for Rural Development (MoRD) said that the high demand in different parts of the country were “fluctuations” due to several conditions including a weak monsoon, MGNREGS activists believe that the climatic conditions just added to the rather weak rural economy.
“The demand for works under Mahatma Gandhi NREGS may be different
for different states during the month of August, due to several conditions, including the pattern of monsoon across India. As per the data there is a fluctuation in person-days generated in the month of August across different financial years, as per the demand for works under the scheme,” the ministry stated in reply to a question in the House.
While the overall demand for MGNREGS work went up April onwards this year and has stayed high till recently, as compared to that in the previous years, it peaked in August.
The number of total person-days generated in August in the current financial year across the states was 2418.13 lakh. This was the highest number recorded since the pandemic, when the person-days recorded in the corresponding period were the highest ever – 2,781.12 lakh in 2021-22 and 2,600.78 lakh in 2020-21.
Data shows that the number of overall person-days generated in the same month in 2022-23 was 1666.97 lakh. It was 1525.36 lakh in 2019-20, 1728.48 lakh in 2018-19, 1374.57 lakh in 2017-18, 1610.35 lakh in 2016-17, 1417.25 in 2015-16 and 893.18 lakh in 2014-15.
MGNREGS is a demand-driven scheme that allows 100 days of guaranteed unskilled manual work to adult members of a rural household in a financial year. It is considered to be the last resort for the rural population depending mostly on agricultural and daily-wage work.
The scheme acted as a safety net for scores of migrant workers during the pandemic when they had to retreat back to villages for work being halted in urban centres.
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