Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on July 23 kept the allocation for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme unchanged at Rs 86,000 crore.
The allocation stands 4 percent percent lower than the Rs 90,000-crore-plus that the government had spent on the job scheme last year. The MGNREGA allocation had crossed Rs 1 lakh crore during the pandemic year of FY21 and has since declined. In FY21, the spending was 80.8 percent higher than the initial budget allocation.
A Moneycontrol analysis had found that the government has outspent on the MGNREGA by 30 percent on average each year for the last decade.
Between FY22 and FY24, the actual expenditure on the scheme exceeded the budgeted outlay by 34.2 percent on average, compared with 16 percent excess spending between FY16 and FY20.
This is despite the fact that the share of spending on centrally sponsored schemes, which have a state funding component like the MGNREGA, have witnessed a decline over the last decade.
The share of the central government’s spending on central sector schemes, which are 100 percent funded by the Union government and include subsidies and direct benefit transfer programmes like Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana, has risen over the last decade.
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