CAG Report: 83% households in Bihar didn't get Complete Employment under MGNREGS

A special report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in Bihar has revealed that a total of 83 percent households in the state did not get the employment of 100 days under the scheme.

CAG studied 15 districts as sample out of 38 districts of Bihar and found that maximum 17 percent households were provided with 100 day jobs during 2007-2012 (period of 11th Five Year Plan). Of the fifteen sample districts, Madhubani stood at the last position with employment generation rate of below one percent and Begusarai topped in the list with seven percent employment.

The agency also recorded a decreasing trend in job offering from a sharp drop from 75 percent in 2007-08 to 20 percent in 2011-12. It also noted that of all the registered population for the scheme just one to seven percent were provided 100 days employment. The agency also noted that 76.42 man-days of work could not be created in Bihar because of certain irregularities, which included non-release or delay in release of funds, non-payment of wages, unspent amount of grant, excess consumption of material over wages and few problems at local level.

There were several loopholes and weaknesses on part of project implementation starting from planning, execution, fund management, monitoring and training in implementation of MGNREGS and grievance redressal mechanism in the State.

In the survey a sample of 1997 beneficiaries, there existed problems at different levels like fixation of photographs on job cards. About 37 percent job cards had no photographs, apart from this multiple job cards were issued to the same household.

In about 26 percent cases, the payment of wages that was entered on the job cards didn't matched with the amount credited to their accounts. Also, wages were deposited in the personal accounts of the working agencies first and further given via cheques which were dropped due to lack of balance in the accounts of the agencies.