BENGALURU: Expressing concern over the wages to be paid under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) remaining unpaid, the Supreme Court, in a letter addressed to states, highlighted the need to clear such payments on priority.
Stating that MGNREGA workers are not being paid on time, the SC has highlighted Writ Petition (C) No.857 of 2015 Swaraj Abhiyan versus Union of India and others.
“You are aware of the fact that the ministry has been harping on the need to clear all wage liabilities on priority. In fact, it has been clearly stated that the payment of wages ought to be the first charge on the funds released to states/Union Territories from time to time,” SC said in a letter addressed to Department of Rural Development and Panchayat Raj secretaries of all states.
West Bengal leads the pack with un-paid payments worth a whopping Rs 15,783.38 lakh, pending since July 2016. Jammu & Kashmir has a backlog of Rs 13,950.93 lakh pending as payments to workers.
The heartland states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar need to pay Rs 7,299.39 lakh and Rs 9,873.27 lakh, respectively. In the northeast, Arunachal Pradesh is still to disburse Rs 5,460.11 lakh while Assam has Rs 3,874.69 lakh to disburse.
Among the southern states, Tamil Nadu has to disburse Rs 1,471.16 lakh to its contract labourers, Telangana Rs 233.64 lakh, Karnataka Rs 1,106.76 lakh, Kerala Rs 281.95 lakh and Andhra Pradesh Rs 587.25 lakh.
According to rural economist Vijay Sardana, the scheme has been plagued with unfair practices with contractors siphoning off funds in collusion with officials. He also adds that with the government tightening the screws on such malpractices, such incidents have come down.
“MNREGA is functioning at the whims and fancies of the local contractors and local officials. Now there is a concept of social audit, but who is doing, how it is to be done etc are gaining ground now. This is causing a delay in the payment of compensation as you have to go through an auditing system,” Sardana added.
“Now if you look at the amount which is payable and approved, after that there is the procedure of verification of the amount. Every state technically is sitting on verification. There can be two reasons for this – there is no interest or there are no proper documents. The state governments also do not have proper machinery for this,” he added.