The 100-day employment guarantee scheme was on May 8 expanded to include 30 new works related to agriculture, watershed, livestock, fisheries, flood management and irrigation and aligned with a national sanitation campaign. “It is the first time since the launch of the scheme (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) that 30 new works have been added in its schedule... Today we can say MGNREGA 2.0 has started,” Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh told reporters. He said his ministry had sought to add as many agriculture-related works to MGNREGA as possible. He had, earlier in the day, told parliament about the new permissible works. The new norms provide that Rs 4,500 be contributed as labour component from MGNREGA towards construction of toilets under Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), Ramesh said. He said quality toilets would be constructed in rural areas for Rs 9,900.

On queries about suggestions that part of payment under MGNREGA should be made in food grains, Ramesh said the matter “was under consideration at the highest level”. However, he did not favour the suggestion and said that many assets under the food- for-work programme were “mythical assets”.

He said the suggestion for making part of MGNREGA payment in food grains had the backing of the food ministry due to problems of adequate storage and costs incurred in storage.

The focus of the expanded MGNREGA would be in blocks with sizeable population of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes and those blocks, which had been getting Rs 12-crore fund in a year under the scheme, said Mihir Shah, a member of the Planning Commission.

Such blocks would be provided technical assistance for success of expanded MGNREGA, he said. The Government wanted to make MGNREGA a productivity-enhancing instrument, which led to an increase in agricultural output, he added.

Ramesh said panchayats would decide the priority of works in gram sabha meetings with a stipulation that overall labour to material ratio would be 60:40. Panchayats should open a separate account for MGNREGA as they received sizeable funds under the scheme every year, he said. Kerala, Bihar, Sikkim, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan had made suggestions in the task undertaken by the ministry to extend the list of works, he said.

Meanwhile, the Government on May 22 informed that there had been a decline in total number of households which demanded employment under MGNREGA in 2011-12 compared to 2010-11. Replying to a written question in the Rajya Sabha, the Union Minister of State for Rural Development Pradeep Jain said that the data reported for States for 2011-12 was till April 27, 2012, and the data from the States of Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland were yet to be fully updated and uploaded. He said the demand for employment also varied from state to state and had shown increase in several states like Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Maharashtra, Mizoram, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal in 2011-12. Number of Households which demanded employment under MGNREGA in 2010-11 was 5,57,56,087, while in 2011-12 it was 5,00,85,526.

MGNREGA provides a legal guarantee for up to 100 days of wage employment to every household in a financial year for doing unskilled manual work, on demand to be made following a prescribed process. Jain informed that demand for employment under MGNREGA was dependent upon several external factors, including availability of alternate employment opportunities The findings of independent studies conducted by the Ministry of Rural Development indicate that out-migration from villages has gone down due to implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, MGNREGA.