National Advisory Council to review MGNREGA effectiveness

UPA's flagship programme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) would be reviewed by the National Advisory Council to gauge the challenges in effective implementation of the ambitious scheme.

The reconstituted national advisory council (NAC) met yesterday to discuss the achievements of the last two years, with two new members Mihir Shah and Ashish Mondal joining the deliberations. According to sources, the performance of the MGNREGA dominated the  discussion.

Social activist and NAC member Aruna Roy, stressing the need to put a  mechanism in place to gauge the impact of the programme and the challenges before it, said there was an urgent need to ensure the quality of asset creation being done through the scheme.

She also submitted a petition to Sonia Gandhi saying that it was the need of the hour to initiate a series of discussions across the country so that the various bottlenecks present in the implementation of MGNREGA could be eliminated.

In particular, she said the NAC needed to look at and ensure that certain basic provisions of the Act were decisively institutionalised, including demand for work, payment of minimum wages, timely payments, expansion of the category of works, quality of assets and a social audit.

Other members added there had been a lot of criticism of the scheme and a gauge was needed to measure the impact at the grassroots.