Now, NREGA workers to join Clean India mission

Linking its predecessor UPA’s flagship rural job guarantee scheme with its own pet “Swachchh Bharat” project, the Modi government has now decided to use MGNREGA workers in its plans of cleaning up rural India.

In a new programme to clean up villages under the Swachchh Bharat Mission, the local bodies have been directed to use wage labour under the MGNREGA for garbage collection and segregation of waste in villages.

In a letter to all secretaries concerned with rural sanitation in state governments, department of drinking water and sanitation secretary Parmeswaran Iyer has asked for the model being used by Tamil Nadu for solid waste management to be replicated in all states. Under this model, the state has undertaken a solid waste management initiative based on segregation and recycling of waste using labour from MGNREGA and participation of women’s self help groups.

“It is advised that your state may consider replication of this model by leveraging resources from MGNREGA,” the letter said.

The scheme has already been used in irrigation schemes with the government proposing to construct 0.5 million farm ponds and dug wells through MGNREGA.

Under this new scheme to clean up villages, segregation of waste would be done at household level, which would then be collected and transported by trained workers. Recyclable waste is stored in sorting sheds and organic waste is composted.

The budget per village in this scheme is expected to be more than Rs 9 lakh. Once this is set up, running cost required may be 50 per cent of the recurring cost — estimated to be Rs 2.5 lakh per year per village — as 50 per cent of the cost will be met from the income from sale of the waste products.

MGNREGA will be used for construction of sheds for storing recyclable and hazardous waste, Payments of wages of workers and supervisors would also be done through this scheme.

The MGNREGA, which was credited with having pushed up rural wages in a considerable manner after it was launched by the UPA, had been low on the priority list of the NDA government when it came to power in 2014. But in the 2015-16, Union Budget, finance minister Arun Jaitley, allocated Rs 34,699 crore to the scheme and further topped it up with Rs 7,000 crore in the monsoon session taking the total allocation for the year upto Rs 41,699 crore, the highest ever for any year. The scheme’s performance also started looking up and in 2015-16. The delay in wage transfers have also come down.