MGNREGA

• Centre under pressure to link wages paid under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, of MGNREGA, to minimum wages Under the Act, a worker is entitled to . 100 a day for minimum of 100 days in a year. Centre concerned that states could raise the minimum wages to some unreasonably high level and enforce it just for MGNREGA Govt recently decided to benchmark MGNREGA wages to inflation, which will push up remuneration between 17% and 30%
• NREGA wages to be linked to inflation
• The government will link wages under the employment guarantee act to inflation risking higher food inflation, but resisted the demand to bring them on par with minimum wages.
• Minimum wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
  (MGNREGA) will rise between 17% and 30% from the current Rs. 100 a day with effect from January 1. The new rate will come into effect from January 1 this year and will require an additional Rs. 3,500 crore spend in the current year itself.
• The decision to link NREGA wages to inflation is a half-way solution to the demands of social activists that the scheme guarantee at least the minimum wages. Sonia
  Gandhi had backed the demand to align NREGA payments with minimum wages. But the government had admitted its inability to meet the demand as states could then revise the minimum wages sharply knowing that the Centre will be legally bound to pay.
• It had, instead, set up an expert committee under Planning Commission member Pranob Sen to suggest an appropriate indexing of NREGA wages. The government said it will consider its recommendations once submitted.
• Why is a social audit of the MGNREGA preferable to the audits by CAG?
• MGNREGA is an example of transiting from welfare plans to rights-based
  entitlements.  This challenges the challenges the conventional grammar
  of account-based audits that look mainly at expenditure, conformity to
  rules and classificatory heads.
• As the law (MGNREGA) is for the very poor, for whom time is critical since
  the work to be given in 15 days and wages paid in 15 days serve as the
  lifeline to stay off debt and starvation, then a post-event indictment
  will not suffice.
• In a rights-based law, not only outcomes but the processes of exercise of
  rights are central concerns as they determine the nature of outcomes and
  determine accountability for decisions taken. Legal rights are vested
  in individuals. A sample check of some individual’s records cannot
  safeguard or verify the rights of other individuals, nor can the
  findings of a sample be generalised or applied to other individuals. The
  only way the exercise of rights and the implementation of corresponding
  legal guarantees can be regularly and universally scrutinised is
  through a system that audits processes concurrently at their level of
  incidence. The CAG audit, in its conventional form, cannot do this. Such
  an audit is possible only by the local community that is most equipped
  with to assess because it has the most powerful tool for such
  interrogation — local knowledge and historical memory which defy the
  best government records.