India lucky to have NREGA, says World Bank official

Even as the freshly-elected UPA government goes full thrust on its National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme, the scheme has won praise from the World Bank.

"India is fortunate to have in place a programme that people can fall back on to find work in these hard times", The World Bank's country director for India Roberto Zagha said at a book launch in New Delhi on Wednesday.

Describing the NREGA as innovative programme, he said it is ''an important cushion for poor people living in rural areas who might be at risk of being pushed further into poverty''.

Noting that nowhere the potential impact of safety nets is larger than in India, he said the country spends more of its income on safety – more than 2 per cent of GDP – than most developing countries.

Meanwhile, it is reported that the government may expand the scope of work offered under NREGA by introducing skilled jobs like spinning and weaving under the programme as part of its agenda for the first hundred days.

The textiles ministry has prepared a project to train rural people in textiles processes including spinning and weaving. It wants people trained under this initiative should be given employment under the NREGS, according to Financial Express.

''We have identified activities like spinning and weaving to train 50 lakh people in rural areas of the country in the rest of 11th Plan period (2007-2012). We want to dovetail with the ministry of rural development for the project so that these people could get employment under the NREGA,'' textiles secretary Rita Menon told the newspaper.

At the same time, the Congress-led UPA government has allocated Rs813.53 crore to Left-ruled Tripura under the NREGA for the current financial year. The allocation has been sanctioned on the basis of labour department accounts, which state that each labour card holder will be given 100 days of work a year, state rural development Minister Jitendra Chowdhury said in Agartala.

Last year, the state received Rs514.27 crore for carrying out the national flagship programme, of which Rs24 crore remained unspent, he said.

While Rajasthan was the best among the states in executing the NREGA in the last financial year, Tripura was second, Chowdhury told reporters on Wednesday. He said that an average of 95.42 per cent allocation under the NREGA was spent in the state with only 4.50 per cent remained unspent.