NEW DELHI: Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi, accompanied by other ‘young MPs’ of the party, met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to press for better implementation of the UPA government’s flagship development programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).
The move by the Congress to seek greater Central monitoring of the scheme comes in the wake of Opposition-ruled states taking the credit for the success of the scheme where it is working and the Congress having to take the flak for the drawbacks.
Mr Gandhi, who has used the NREGA to signal his concern for the ‘aam aadmi’ even earlier, and the young MP who met the PM asked that the scheme should be made to reach the poor, for whom it is meant. Their concern was articulated a day before the budget and soon after Congress President Sonia Gandhi herself noted that “some reports suggest that NREGA has not been systematically implemented across states”.
Writing in the January issue of the Congress mouthpiece, Sandesh, Ms Gandhi had said: “This (problems with implementation) must change if social development measures are not to remain only on paper. Here our party cadre must come forward and work with NGOs involved in the sector to weed out corruption and mismanagement”.
The matter has been discussed in top-level meeting of the party as well. Ms Gandhi’s mention of the ‘reports’ could indicate a CAG draft document on performance of NREGA in 2005, which had found the scheme failing to meet its target of providing 100 days of employment per household.
The party, which is banking on NREGA to serve as the showpiece of its pro-poor thrust in the upcoming elections, is therefore working on strategies to dispel the impression that the scheme is not working.
A Congress statement said that the party’s genext leaders met the PM to suggest measures to improve efficiency and impact of the scheme where possible. They asked for a social auditing mechanism to check if those for whom the scheme was meant were getting benefiting. They also asked for the mechanism to be institutionalised all across India.
The Congress added that the group told the PM that as the Centre was spending a lot of money on the scheme it should specifically monitor grass-root spending by the state and seek formats by which such monitoring could be made possible.
However, asked whether the Congress was in favour of making amendments to the NREGA to have it implemented by the Centre fully, party spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said that already the ‘entire contour of the scheme was central’.
Mr Gandhi’s group also asked for progressive national implementation of the scheme, creation of IT infrastructure so that the ‘nitty gritty’ and ‘facts’ of the scheme were available at the press of a button.
The Congress has also singled out Andhra Pradesh, where it is in power, for mention while talking of states that have performed well on this count.
Mr Gandhi was accompanied by MPs such as Tushar Amar Singh Choudhary, Milind Deora, Sandeep Dikshit, Deepinder Hooda, Jitin Prasada, Pallam Raju, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Devrat Singh, Tejaswini Ramesh, and Balashowry Vallabhaneni.
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