Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Sept 2: The centre is considering extending the “Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme,” the world’s biggest employment-oriented scheme devised for the rural areas, to the urban centres to help the workers in cities left unemployed by the Corona pandemic-induced lockdowns.
Sanjay Kumar, a joint secretary in the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, said initially the scheme when approved would be rolled out in smaller towns and later to other big cities. The initial cost of the programme as being planned had been estimated at Rs 350 billion, he said.
He said the idea of extending the employment-guarantee scheme to the urban areas was under the consideration of the government since last year but the “pandemic gave a push to this discussion.” The reason for starting the scheme with smaller towns was that the big-city projects typically need professional expertise, he explained.
The centre is already spending more than Rs one trillion on rural jobs this year providing workers in the hinterland a guaranteed minimum daily wage of Rs 202 for at least 100 days a year. An urban version of the plan would soften the blow on citizens most affected by the Corona pandemic which has set Asia’s third-largest economy on course for its deepest contraction in history.
The rural programme involved employing people for local public-works projects such as road-building, well-digging and reforestation. It now covered more than 270 million people and this year was also used as a tool to provide employment to migrant workers returning from cities amid the lockdown.
According to an analysis by the London School of Economics, Covid-19 has also decimated livelihoods in urban areas creating a new underclass of workers being pushed into poverty. This had forced the government to consider launching an employment guarantee scheme in the urban India also to prevent further downslide of the urban workers.
According to an estimate, more than 121 million people lost jobs in April alone pushing the unemployment rate to a record 23%. But according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt, the jobless rate has since fallen as the economy reopened.
Economic Affairs Secretary Tarun Bajaj had earlier told a section of the media about the proposed urban-oriented employment programme raising expectation of a fiscal boost after a previously announced Rs 21 trillion support package fell short in terms of actual budget outgo.
Stressing the importance of the proposed scheme, Ashima Goyal, a professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research in Mumbai, and an adviser to the prime minister Narendra Modi, claimed that it would give the necessary demand boost to the economy.
