Rural schemes empower 37 mn women till June, generate 3 billion person-days in FY24, says economic survey

New Delhi: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) generated 3.1 billion person-days and 521 million average person-days of work per household in FY24, a rise of 5.2% and 9% from a year ago, said the economic survey presented by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the Lok Sabha on Monday.

It said the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihood Mission (DAY-NRLM) empowered 37 million women and promoted 9 million self-help groups (SHGs) till June since its inception last year. 

Further, under the Swachh Bharat Mission-Grameen, around 115 million toilets were built and 117 million households provided with tap water connections under the Jal Jeevan Mission as of 10 July, the survey added.

MGNREGS aims to improve the livelihood security of households in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed waged employment in a financial year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. 

Empowering poor

DAY-NRLM is one of the world’s largest social sector schemes, aiming to empower poor households’ access to meaningful self-employment and skilled wage employment opportunities. The scheme has helped women access scientific knowledge, specialized skills, and valuable exposure to motivate and ignite new energy to reform their livelihoods and venture into new activities. 

They have taken up enterprises like solar panels to make sanitary pads, soaps, detergents, face masks, sanitizers, fencing material, etc. Initiated in 2011, the mission has its footprint across 7,135 blocks in 742 districts of 28 states and 6 UTs. 

Lakhpati Didi under DAYNRLM, launched last year, aims to uplift 30 million SHG households to a minimum annual income of ₹1 lakh within three years. 

It focuses on diversified livelihood activities, district-level planning, household support, government department convergence, and capacity building of staff and community members.

“The potential of SHGs needs to be tapped by enabling their upscaling into larger enterprises, harnessing professional support and management. With proper training and professional guidance, women’s collectives can emerge as self-sustainable enterprises at scale,” the economic survey said.

Maximum impact

While MGNREGS began as a wage employment scheme, it has evolved into an asset creation programme for sustainable livelihood diversification, as seen in the rise in the share of individual beneficiary ‘works on individual land’ from 9.6% of total completed works in FY14 to 73.3% in FY24.

To derive maximum impact from the scheme, MGNREGS has been converged with various initiatives run by seperate ministries like animal husbandry and dairying, agriculture and farmer welfare, Ayush, panchayati raj and defence ministries.

Data for FY24 shows that although Tamil Nadu has less than 1% of the country’s poor population, it accounted for nearly 15% of all MGNREGS funds released. Similarly, Kerala, with only 0.1% of the poor population, used almost 4% of the Nation’s MGNREGS funds. Together, these states generated 510 million person-days of employment. In contrast, Bihar and UP, with about 45% of the poor population, accounted for only 17% of MGNREGA funds and generated 530 million person-days of employment.

Ahead of the full budget presentation by Sitharaman on Tuesday, economists and industry experts do not see a budgetary allocation hike from the interim budget for any rural development schemes, except housing.

“I don’t foresee any change in FY25’s budgetary allocation for rural schemes; it could be as much as was given in the interim budget,” said Madan Sabnavis, chief economist at Bank of Baroda.

“The progress of the monsoon is also satisfactory now. So, there is no need to do anything in NREGA and PM-KISAN—two big schemes on which the government spends more,” he added. A good monsoon takes care of some of the rural distress because the biggest contributor to the income of rural India is still agriculture.

Economists and industry stakeholders earlier urged the Union government to ramp up allocations for rural schemes and boost housing programmes to stimulate consumer demand, since private consumption has grown at a significantly lower rate than the nearly 8% annual economic growth.

Rural India’s growth

Consumption growth has remained weak since the pandemic. Private consumption is recovering, with growth tracking at 4% in the March quarter, as against 1.5% a year ago, but it is just catching up with the pre-pandemic trend and remains below the pre-pandemic average of 6.3% in 2019.

Rural India’s monthly per capita household consumption, adjusted for inflation, rose over 40% from FY12 to FY23, statistics ministry data showed, though it remains lower than urban consumption. Without adjusting for inflation, the figures stood at ₹6,459 for urban households and ₹3,773 for rural households in FY23, compared with ₹2,630 and ₹1,430, respectively, in FY12.

The focus of the government is to improve the economy through decentralized planning, better access to credit, skilling of youth, enhanced livelihood opportunities, empowerment of women, social security net provision, basic housing, education, health, and sanitation facilities, etc. As part of the plan, it is working towards providing basic amenities to all households in rural areas through many schemes and programmes.

Under Pradhan Mantri Away Yojana Gramin, 26 million houses were constructed for the poor in the last nine years ended 10 July 2024, 103 million LPG connections were provided under PM Ujjwala Yojana from 2016 to 2 June 2024, and 1.5 million km road construction was completed under Gram Sadak Yojana between FY15 and 10 July 2024. As many as 98 million beneficiaries registered under Regional Rural banks and 1.9 million beneficiaries registered under Rural Cooperative banks as of 26 June 2024 and PFMS e-GramSwaraj integrated with over 263,000 Panchayats out of 279,000 onboarded for their payment transactions as of 10 July 2024, according to data from the respective ministry.

In the interim budget, the government allocated ₹2.65 trillion to the rural development ministry, including ₹86,000 crore for MGNREGS. The allocation to the ministry was ₹26,824 crore higher than the revised estimates for the year FY24.