The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, said on Saturday that the issue of delayed payments to workers under the UPA Government’s flagship programme — MGNREGA — needed to be resolved at the earliest.
He also called upon the Planning Commission to fill the gaps in the concurrent evaluation of this rural employment scheme.
Concurrent evaluation refers to assessing the impact of the scheme while it is being implemented, without waiting for any periodic audit.
“The sooner we tackle this problem of delayed payments, I think better results would be in the offing”, Dr Singh said after releasing the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA Sameeksha, an anthology of research study on this popular scheme, here.
‘Story worth telling’
Noting that the MGNREGA in numbers was a “story worth telling”, Dr Singh said that in 2010-11, nearly 5.5 crore families or nearly one in four rural households were provided over 250 crore person-days of work under the programme.
“This is a sharply higher figure than the 90 crore person-days of work provided in the first year of the scheme in 2006-07”, he said.
Dr Singh said he was surprised to hear from the Rural Development Minister, Mr Jairam Ramesh that the concurrent evaluation process on the scheme was not in good shape.
“When I was in the Planning Commission long ago, I think we started the programme of concurrent evaluation for a number of rural development programmes. I don’t know why they are languishing, if they are at all languishing. But I would request the Planning Commission Deputy Chairman, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, to apply his mind to making good this deficiency as well”, he said.
role for panchayats
He also said that Panchayati Raj institutions had to gear up to play the pivotal role assigned to them under the scheme, and stressed the need to provide resources to help panchayats perform the function effectively.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr Ramesh said while audits, investigations and “post-mortems” take place, they were no substitute to concurrent audit.
He hoped that his proposal to the Planning Commission to put in place a dedicated network for the same would be approved.
Mr Ramesh felt that the concurrent audit should be handled by an independent evaluation office to be set up under the Planning Commission.