NEW DELHI 13 :The Congress has strongly criticised the Centre’s decision to rename the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), accusing the Modi government of prioritising “rebranding” over genuine reform and questioning the move to drop Mahatma Gandhi’s name from the flagship scheme.
According to party leaders, the Union Cabinet has approved a bill to rename the programme as “Poojya Bapu Grameen Rozgar Yojna” while also proposing an increase in guaranteed workdays from 100 to 125 per year for rural households. Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh labelled the government a “master” at renaming schemes, citing earlier changes such as Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan to Swachh Bharat and the rural LPG programme to Ujjwala, and asked what was “wrong” with retaining Mahatma Gandhi’s name in the law.
Another senior leader, K C Venugopal, alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who once called MGNREGA a “monument of failure”, was now attempting to claim credit for the scheme by renaming it while continuing to underfund it. He argued that workers have been demanding higher wages even as allocations fall and arrears rise, calling the move a “cosmetic change” and part of a strategy to slowly weaken the programme.
Enacted in 2005, MGNREGA guarantees at least 100 days of wage employment annually to rural households whose adult members are willing to undertake unskilled manual work, and is widely regarded as a key rural safety-net scheme. Opposition leaders maintain that no matter what name the government gives it, the scheme’s origins under former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and then Congress president Sonia Gandhi will remain firmly associated with its creation and implementation.
