The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) will be fully restructured and implemented in the State so that only works that involve asset creation will be taken up under the scheme, Minister for Local Self Government K.T. Jaleel told the House on Friday.
Responding to questions raised by N. Shamsuddeen, N.A. Nellikkunnu and others, he said the government had selected 27 blocks where the restructured MGNREGS would be piloted, before it was scaled up.
It was a sad state of affairs that despite the State receiving over Rs.10,500 crore under the scheme in the past eight to 10 years, not even 20 per cent of the amount had been spent on asset creation. The result was that in all these years, the scheme achieved nothing in the State, except having disbursed money as wages.
This year also, the State would receive Rs. 2,661 crore towards the MGNREGS but henceforth asset creation would be the main focus of the scheme, he added.
In the past five years, not even 10 per cent of the Plan allocation of local bodies were spent in productive sectors. This had created a lot of issues in the agrarian sector.
