8 states declared drought affected, Centre allows them to offer 50 days of extra work under NREGS

NEW DELHI: The government has declared eight states as drought affected, allowing them to offer 50 days of extra work to each household under the rural job guarantee scheme as water scarcity often hurts demand for manual labour.

Kerala, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu would be eligible to provide 150 days of manual work per household under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in the financial year 2017-18.

The Centre is also releasing Rs.24,000 crore - half the total budgeted allocation this year towards NREGS - to states in April itself to help them prepare to handle the situation as some forecasts say India is heading to a year of belownormal monsoon.

8 states declared drought affected, Centre allows them to offer 50 days of extra work under NREGS

"We are allocating the funds to states for the April-to-June period," a senior government official told ET. “Demand for work will pick up because of the drought spell and lack of funds should not be any impediment to NREGS workers.”

India faced two back-to-back drought years before it got a healthy monsoon in 2016, though some parts of the country still got below-normal rains.

Private weather forecaster Skymet predicts a below-normal monsoon this year as well, even as some global weather watchers see the emergence of El Niño conditions by July.

El Niño is often associated with poor monsoon in India, a country where the four-month season delivers nearly 70 per cent of the annual rains. A sudden rise in temperature across various parts of the country since mid-March has already sparked concerns of an impending water crisis.

As climate change makes droughts more frequent, the government is taking steps to mitigate the impact. Water conservation is one of those steps and it has been made the main focus of NREGS in 2017-18. States have been told that at least 65 per cent of the total expenditure incurred under it must be for water-related works.

The Ministry of Water Resources, it is learnt, has flagged 15 states as prone to face drought in the coming year.

The rural development ministry, meanwhile, is in the process of finalising the amount to be transferred to each state based on their opening balance, pending liabilities and the state contribution to NREGS.

As many as 2,264 blocks across states have been termed as irrigation-deprived by the government and extensive drought proofing work will be taken up in such places this year under the employment guarantee scheme. The government has set a target of constructing 5 lakh farm ponds during 2017-18. During the last financial year, close to 5.6 lakh farm ponds were built under NREGS.

The government is also taking up geotagging of all assets created under NREGS. It has made it mandatory to geotag each asset within one month of the completion of the work.

The rural development ministry has spent `48,220 crore under NREGS in fiscal 2016-17.

The amount included an allocation of Rs.47,499 crore and an additional Rs.721 crore it received through re-appropriation from other divisions in the last supplementary budget of 2016-17.
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