Kerala is again stepping up pressure on the Centre to immediately release the ₹1,114 crore due to the State for the 12.98-lakh Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) workers that had been pending since July.
A vast majority of the women workers hailing from 25 lakh families below the poverty line have been forced into distress since the wage component alone amounting to ₹898 crore has not been disbursed for the past five months.
Minister for Local Self-Government A.C. Moideen has taken up the issue with Union Rural Development Minister Narendra Singh Tomar seeking his urgent intervention to clear the arrears.
No response from Centre
The government had flagged the issue on October 18 when the arrears was about ₹483.31 crore, but it did not elicit any response from the Centre and it kept on mounting over the past few months.
As per the provisions of the Act, the unskilled workers engaged under the scheme are entitled to get their wages every fortnight, failing which they could initiate legal action for securing the dues. But quite often the disbursal of arrears gets delayed, mostly citing minor audit objections and even questioning the output of the workers who survive on a frugal diet.
Local Self-Government Department sources told The Hindu that the scrutiny procedure was mostly flawed and minor executional lapses as well as procedural errors were disproportionately amplified to defer the payments.
Sole source of income
Such nitpicking tends to defeat the very purpose of the scheme, to aid the indigent, the marginalised and the deprived sections who heavily rely on the scheme for survival.
The women beneficiaries who seek employment under the scheme take it as the sole source of income and when deprived of the benefit are pushed to abject poverty. Such aspects were mostly overlooked and the fund release was held up on flimsy grounds, sources said.
Since the State government was battling a grave resource crunch and seriously working out options, including a Plan cut, it could ill-afford to share the Spartan resources at its disposal for paying off the wage arrears for the time being and then get it refunded from the Centre, sources said.
