CAG report on MGNREGA

An audit report of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has slammed the State government for non-performance and poor maintenance of records in implementing the scheme from 2007 to 2012. The performance audit report of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has shown significant decline in per rural household employment generation in the last two years.

CAG conducted door-to-door survey to identify persons willing to register under the MGNREGS was not conducted in 39 grama panchayats and tampering with muster rolls was noticed in all grama panchayats in Thiruvananthapuram. Delay in wage payment from 23 to 138 days was reported in all grama panchayats. Besides, payment of Rs.12.86 lakh was made without measuring the works and wage slips were not generated in 37 of the 39 grama panchayats. Details of the wages paid were not recorded on the job card at most of the grama panchayats,.

Significant irregularities are:

a) The per rural household employment has declined from 54 days in 2009-10 to 43 days in 2011-12.
b) There is a substantial decline in the proportion of works completed in 2011-12. The works amounting to around Rs 4,070 crore were incomplete even after one to five years of launching. It points to impermissible works undertaken to the tune of about Rs 2,252 crore.
c) The audit report also observes that Bihar, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh which constituted 46 per cent of the rural poor utilised only 20 per cent of the total funds released under the Scheme. This indicated that the correlation between poverty levels and implementation of MGNREGA was not very high, the report states.
d) The CAG audit blames the ministry for relaxing all conditionalities and releasing a sum of Rs 1,960.45 crore in March, 2011 to the states, contravening norms of financial accountability. An amount of Rs 4,072.99 crore was released by the ministry during 2008-12 to states for use in the subsequent financial year, in contravention of budgetary provisions and General Financial Rules, the report states.

MGNREGA was enacted with the objective of enhancing livelihood security in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year, to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

The Act initially came into force in 200 districts with effect from 2 February 2006 and was extended to cover all the rural districts by 1 April 2008.