Modification Suggested to Government of India for implementation of MNREGA

GOI is spending billions of rupees to provide jobs to unskilled rural workers through implementation of rural development schemes under MNREGA. It is widely acknowledged that due to multi-layer leakages, rural laboring class people, for whom MNREGSs are implemented, hardly get any benefit. Large share of the budget is pocketed by the elite/mediocre class in connivance with the agencies/officials responsible for implementation of the MNREG schemes. Had this amount been routed through small/marginal farmers, Indian agriculture could have been transformed to cope with its present crisis. An innovative implementing mechanism should be designed in such a way that the job card holding workers would put their labours in performing paddy sowing and harvesting activities of small and marginal farmers and receive their wages from the MNREGSs. Such an arrangement would bring about multidimensional impacts in terms of enhancing the production and productivity of the small/marginal farmers and farm labourers, checking migration, controlling price rise and alleviating mass poverty in the rural areas. GOI should think about such an innovation instead of mortgaging the productive resources in the hands of multinationals either in the form of promotion of contract farming in private lands or leasing out lands to exploit our natural resources (water, forests and minerals ) compelling majority of our fellow working countrymen to live under abject poverty. Thus, we recommend that the GOI should modify MNREGA in terms of bearing entire wage bills of paddy sowing and harvesting operations of small and marginal farmers.