Under the Centre’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), 100 days of employment and wages are to be assured to everyone in the village. The beneficiaries get Rs 180 per day of work which is mainly civic.
The farming sector faces the grave danger of insufficient agriculture labour even as the Telangana Government is showcasing farmers’ smiles as they receive Rs 4,000 per acre cheque for this season.
“After visiting 27 villages of my constituency, there is a growing demand in villages of Telangana to link agriculture with MGNREGS,” Nizamabad MP Kavitha Kalvakuntla said and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh to consider the demand.
“Is it not true that just because the scheme has to be implemented, the beneficiaries are being made to do unnecessary and irrelevant work? They are made to remove debris from one place and throw it in another place and vice-versa,” IT and municipal administration KT Rama Rao asked the crowd in villages where he addressed public meetings during the Rythu Bandhu scheme.
One Jeevan Kunta tweeted to Kavitha: “People are going to MGNREGS works and no one is interested to come agriculture works. Please link it to agriculture.”
The State Government had weighed this issue even before the problem actually cropped up. In the recent TRS plenary on April 27, a resolution was passed asking the Centre to link MGNREGS to agriculture. When this is done, beneficiaries under the MNREGA can be asked to work in agriculture fields and that would help solve the agriculture labour problem to an extent. In all public meetings by TRS leaders and ministers, the public is being asked for a show of hands to link MGNREGS with agriculture. The Telangana Government has made several representations to the Centre on the issue but has not got a response.
