Employment scheme to be expanded

The government was set to expand the scope of the National Employment Guarantee Scheme based on recommendations made by the parliamentary standing committee on the Bill, sources in the rural development ministry said.

The revised draft of the Employment Guarantee Bill will propose that employment be provided to as many people who demand it, rather than limit the scheme to just one able-bodied person from every rural household. This draft will be placed before Parliament in the forthcoming session beginning on July 25.

"The standing committee wants the scheme to be universalised. The idea is to provide employment to everyone who demands it, rather than make it available to one person from a household as the earlier draft proposed," a source in the parliamentary standing committee said.

Sources in the rural development ministry, the nodal ministry for the implementation of the Bill, confirmed that the new Bill would incorporate the recommendation.

"The first phase of implementation in 150 districts will not be a problem. We will divert the funds from the existing employment schemes totalling about Rs 11,000 crore (Rs billion) for the project. However, if the number of people registering for the scheme increases, then the government should be ready to pump in more funds," an official said.

According to the ministry's calculations, if the first phase of implementation in 150 districts attracts about 1 crore (Rs 10 million) registrations and is likely to cost about Rs 10,000 crore (Rs 100 billion), then the implementation of the scheme in 600 districts in India will cost about Rs 40,000 crore (Rs 400 billion).

This is the figure projected by the National Advisory Council) which authored the first version of the Bill.

Ministry sources, however, also warned that if the scheme attracted 1.5 crore (Rs 15 million) registrations in the first phase of implementation and if these numbers were projected for the rest of the country, the government was looking at a budget of between Rs 60,000 crore (Rs 600 billion) and 100,000 crore (Rs 1,000 billion).

These figures are unlikely to be welcome in the finance ministry and the Planning Commission, which had objected to the first draft of the Bill on grounds that it would be unaffordable to the government.