MGNREGA living monument of PM Modi's betrayal of rural India, says Kharge

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Friday slammed the Centre over its handling of the MGNREGA, alleging that the present state of the scheme is "a living monument of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "betrayal" of rural India.

Kharge recalled that in 2005, on this day, the then Congress-led UPA government enacted the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) to ensure 'Right to Work' to crores of people in rural India.

In a post on X, he said at present, there are 13.3 crore active workers who depend on the MGNREGA, despite low wages, abysmal work-days, and facing deletion of job cards.

In the guise of using technology and Aadhaar, the Modi government has deleted over seven crore workers' job cards, cutting these households off from MGNREGA work, the Congress president claimed.

This year's Budget allocation for the MGNREGA is just 1.78 per cent of the total budgetary allocation, which marks a 10-year low in the scheme's funding, he said.

The lower allocat