A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a dig at the Congress over the the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in the Lok Sabha, calling it a living proof of its misrule, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley increased its allocation to ₹34,699 crore, the highest it has ever received.

Jaitley said that he was enhancing MGNREGA’s budget by ₹5,000 crore and it was the highest it has ever got. MGNREGA was the flagship scheme for rural job enhancement under the UPA government and has come up for flak time and again since the Modi government came to power.

Education boost The Finance Minister targeted the country’s 70 per cent rural population with a slew of other measures, including the allocation of ₹79,526 crore for rural development activities, including MGNREGA.

Education received ₹68,968 crore to which Jaitley clubbed the Mid-Day Meal scheme, while health was allocated ₹33,152 crore. A large chunk of these were attributed to the “poor and disadvantaged”, which means that these would impact rural India as would the ₹10,351-crore set aside for women and child development. To create credit for the rural population with priority to SC&ST, and rejuvenate the micro-finance sector, Jaitley allocated a corpus of ₹20,000 crore to create a Micro Units Development Refinance Agency (MUDRA) Bank through a Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana.

To skill village youth under the government’s soon to be launched National Skills Mission, he set aside ₹1,500 crore for the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gramin Kaushal Yojana. Jaitley emphasised the need for streamlining the direct transfer of benefits to rural populations and the poor. Calling it “a game changing reform”, he said the JAM Trinity – Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile – will allow the transfer of benefits “in a leakage-proof, well-targeted and cashless manner”. The Jam Trinity essentially means linking the Prime Minister’s Jan Dhan Yojana with a citizen’s Aadhaar identity and mobile number to transfer subsidies and benefits.

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