MGNREGS | Focus on durable assets showing

Mahatma Gandhi NREGS has seen a significant demand for wage labour specially for water conservation works. About 106 Crore person days have been generated in Financial Year 2017-18 (so far) with 80 lakh to 1 crore persons working every day. Over 84% of the workers are paid within 15 days, a remarkable improvement compared to earlier years. 98% payments are through the electronic Fund Management System (e-FMS). The Central Government has ensured timely release of funds and States have responded by strengthening the implementation machinery to provide timely payments.

The thrust on agriculture and allied activities, is visible at the field level with more than 70% expenditure on these works. Under Mission Water Conservation, 2264 water stressed Blocks have received special attention for Natural Resource Management including water harvesting and water conservation. Nearly 30 lakh individual beneficiary schemes like support for housing, construction of IHHLs, construction of goat shed, poultry shed and dairy shed, land development, etc. have been completed since 2015-16. Solid and Liquid Resource Management works have been taken up on a very large scale.

Over the last 28 months, 30.69 Lakh water related schemes have been completed including 9.70 lakh farm ponds. With a focus on production of organic manure to support agriculture, about 5.5 lakh Vermi/ NADEP Compost units have been completed during this period. MGNREGS has created over 93 lakh hectares irrigation potential in the last 2 years which is currently being evaluated by the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG), New Delhi. The Report will be public by 30 November 2017.

1.71 crore assets of MGNREGS have been geo-tagged so far and are in the public domain. 5.5 crore workers are already on the Aadhaar-based Payment System (ABPS) and the Aadhaar numbers of 9.23 crore workers have been seeded so far in NREGASoft MIS. 90% Job Cards have been verified and 1.18 crore Job Cards have been deleted so far after proper verification. There has been a registration of 1.02 crore new Job Cards to ensure that deprived households get work.

Independent Social Audit Units have been set up in 24 States and 3100 State Resource Persons have been trained to conduct social audit as per auditing standards finalized in consultation with the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG). Large scale training of Self-Help Group women as Village Resource Persons for social audit is being undertaken. 5,547 Bare Foot Technicians (BFT) have been trained so far in 19 States to provide technical support at field level. The Ministry is trying to impress upon the States, the need to go for more BFTs in order to strengthen the technical resource pool.

The Ministry has updated the technical training modules with inclusion of Natural Resource Management perspective. 65000 technical persons supervising MGNREGS works across States/ UTs will be trained under cascading (training of trainers) model. The training has started and so far, 80 State Technical Resource Trainers have been trained.

There is an emphasis on information dissemination through various means including Citizen Information Boards at all worksites, wall writing at prominent places, mobile application, publications, etc. Record maintenance has been made easy and over 90% Gram Panchayats have already adopted the simplified 7 Registers. There is stress on standardization of case record/ Work file. A Public Information Campaign and a Janata Information System will be organized from 1-15 October 2017 at every Gram Panchayat level under the Gram Samriddhi and Swachchata Pakhwada.