As dejected workers return home, use MGNREGA to help them, Sonia Gandhi urged centre (File)
Jobs guarantee scheme MGNREGA has proved its worth and even endured six years of a hostile government that "sought to denigrate it" and has come to reluctantly rely on it, Congress president Sonia Gandhi said today, urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to use the scheme to help the people of India hit by the coronavirus crisis.
"The Modi government has grudgingly come around to the significance of the programme. My plea to the government is, this is a time of national crisis, not a time to play politics. This is not a BJP versus Congress issue. You have a powerful mechanism at hand, please use it to help the people of India in their time of need," Sonia Gandhi wrote in an article published in The Indian Express on Monday.
"Now, as dejected workers return from cities and towns to their villages in droves, deprived of employment, facing an insecure future, a humanitarian crisis on an unprecedented scale is unfolding before us. And the value of the MGNREGA has never been clearer and more evident."
The MGNREGA or Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is a shining example of a radical and rational systemic change, said the Congress chief. "It has proved its worth in the years it has been in existence, even enduring six years of a hostile government. A government that sought to denigrate it, undermine it, has come to reluctantly rely on it. Along with the Public Distribution System put in place by an earlier Congress government, it is the mainstay for our poorest and most vulnerable citizens in preventing starvation and destitution wherever implemented in letter and spirit, especially in today's COVID-19 crisis."
MGNREGA came about because of a people's movement after years of struggle by civil society, said Sonia Gandhi. The Congress party listened to their voices and to those of the people, she wrote.
Millions had been saved from hunger and worse in the 15 years since its inception, she said.
"Mahatma Gandhi said, 'When ridicule fails to kill a movement it begins to command respect'. In independent India, there is no better example of this coming true than the MGNREGA. On assuming office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi realised that shutting down the scheme was not practical. Instead, he sought to deride it, attacking the Congress party in a caustic speech in which he called it 'a living monument of your failure'," the Congress president wrote.
She accused the Modi government of "trying its best to throttle the MGNREGA, hollowing it out and undermining it". But the government was forced to step back, she said, with the unrelenting pressure of activists, the courts and a vocal Opposition in Parliament.
The government instead, to give it a new appearance, integrated it with the prime minister's pet programmes like Swachh Bharat and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, said Mrs Gandhi. "These were passed off as reforms but, in reality, they were no more than a barely disguised dressing up of Congress party initiatives," she said.
The Congress president said the COVID-19 pandemic and the distress it had unleashed had brought the Modi government full circle and the government was obliged to fall back on the UPA's flagship rural relief programme. She referred to the increase in the overall allocation of the programme to more than Rs 1 lakh crore.
"The Modi government may still be looking for some twisted logic to reconcile its dislike of a Congress party programme with its wholesale adoption of it," she said.