NREGS draws flak for inadequate supervision, shoddy assets created

NEW DELHI: The national rural employment guarantee scheme (NREGS) has drawn criticism from the Sumit Bose committee for inadequate supervision, poor project completion rate and shoddy quality of assets created.
Out of 59.19 lakh works taken up under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act during 2015-16, only 23% were completed by year end, according to the committee’s report.

The committee headed by the former finance secretary pointed out there was lack of qualified staff to implement and monitor engineering works under the scheme. “The field supervision of these works by the available engineering personnel is both fairly thin and irregular, resulting in delayed execution and substandard quality,” the panel said.


It also said provisions for administrative costs under certain schemes including Pradhan Mantri Aawas Yojana are not being fully utilised. For 2016-17, the total admissible administrative expenditure for NREGS was ₹3,411 crore, of which ₹520 crore remained unspent.

Under the 14th Finance Commission, gram panchayats are to receive untied grants of over ₹2 lakh crore, which works out to ₹16 lakh annually per panchayat on an average for the period 2015-20. There are about 2.5 lakh gram panchayats in the country.

The committee said there is “an embarrassing lack of data regarding Panchayats,” which makes monitoring rural development schemes difficult, especially with respect to revenue and expenditure.

The rural development ministry expects an allocation of ₹55,000 crore for the rural jobs scheme in the budget for 2018-19, which would be the highest towards the scheme.

The panel recommended revisiting the system of concurrent evaluation that was institutionalised in the 1980s and involve leading institutions to conduct such studies once a year in each state.

The rural development ministry has taken up the matter of social audits with all states and drafted standards for this exercise in consultation with the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. The Centre had even informed the Supreme Court how several states have not complied with the mandatory requirement of conducting a social audit.

To ensure that the concurrent social audit is conducted in an impartial and transparent manner, the government has asked the states to let the self-help groups, village social auditors and Bharat Nirman Volunteers to act as oversight organisations.

The current management information system started by the rural development ministry only tracks the number of works being taken up and completed under different schemes.

The ministry had set up the committee chaired by Bose on ‘Performance Based Payments for Better Outcomes in Rural Development Programmes’ in December 2016.