While 4.51 crore assets have been created under the MGNREGS till date, 54 per cent of these are located in just five States — Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Telangana.
According to the Ministry of Rural Development, one challenge is improving the technical capability of supervising engineers for ensuring creation of quality assets.
Andhra Pradesh has created the highest number of assets (63.10 lakh) followed by Uttar Pradesh (60.21 lakh). These two States together account for 27 per cent of the total assets under the scheme in India. West Bengal (42.57 lakh), Madhya Pradesh (41.75 lakh) and Telangana (37.90 lakh) are among the top States. Goa has the least (1,955) assets. Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Odisha, Jharkhand, Kerala, Maharashtra and Bihar created between 11 lakh to 19 lakh assets. Karnataka 29.58 lakh and Tamil Nadu 24.17 lakh assets.
“Timely payment of wages, improvement in technical capability of supervising engineers for ensuring creation of quality asset, generating more awareness among the stakeholders etc are some of the challenges faced in the implementation of MGNREGS” the Ministry told Rajya Sabha in July. It added that improvement in programme implementation is a continuous process and the government is aware to such challenges.
There are 260 works which are permissible under MGNREGA of which 164 works relate to agriculture and allied activities. A large number of works is for improvement of productivity of land through land development, plantation, vermicomposting, food grain storage, bunding, dug-well etc.
However, the Ministry of Rural Development informed Lok Sabha in July that out of 5,08,697 drought proofing works started in 2018-19 only 60,695 were completed while out of 4,52,603 water conservation and water harvesting works 1,01,692 have been completed.
Farm ponds, dams (check dams, earthen dams etc), roads, plantation, playgrounds, toilets etc are some of the assets created under the scheme. Under MGNREGS, every asset is mandatorily geo-tagged. As on July 2019, 3.61 crore assets has been geo-tagged.