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Mayawati rubbishes rural job scheme

LUCKNOW: By dismissing the Union Government’s flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP) as a half-baked measure, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has thrown a spanner into the works of the Congress. Since the implementation of the scheme in UP and the results have been poor, the Congress had planned to use the programme as a support-building measure before the next Lok Sabha election.

At the Bahujan Samaj Party rally here this past Tuesday, the Chief Minister had said the 100 days of job guarantee under the scheme, in a year, did not provide a lasting solution to the twin problems of poverty and unemployment. She said she would rather prefer permanent employment opportunities “once the BSP comes to power at the Centre”.

The Chief Minister’s rejection of the Centre’s ambitious scheme has come as a rude shock to the Congressmen, who are yet to reconcile with the NREGP being virtually pushed to the backburner by the Mulayam Singh regime. In fact, the Congress had drawn up an elaborate strategy to highlight the discrepancies in the implementation of the programme. Soon after assuming charge as the new Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee president recently, Rita Bahuguna-Joshi had convened a meeting of the party’s monitoring committee for NREGS on October 4 where she directed the Congressmen to conduct a survey of the scheme.

However, following the Chief Minister’s latest remarks the Congress has its task cut out to act as a pressure group for getting the scheme properly implemented in the State. UPCC administration in-charge Ranjit Singh Judeo fears that “the Chief Minister’s categorical statement on the rural job programme would give a plausible excuse to the Govt machinery and district administration to go slow on the scheme. As it were, there have been several complaints about job cards not being distributed to the beneficiaries”.

At the time of the launch of the scheme in February last year, 22 most backward districts of the State were chosen.

Later it was extended to 17 more districts, bringing the total to 39 before all the 70 districts were covered following the decision taken by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently to implement NREGP in the entire country.

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