NREGA : Death knell for Indian agriculture and economy.

NREGA which is aimed at providing at atleast 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every household in villages and improve the rural infrastructure is turning out to be a worst nightmare for Indian agriculture sector.

Abundant and affordable work force was one of the reasons why Indian agriculture was able to overcome the challenges like small holding, lack of mechanization, lack of technology advancement, etc. Now with lack of proper execution NREGA is turning one of our strengths into our weakness.

Let me explain how this is being executed in our area, every morning hundreds of people gather at the proposed work site for attendance and then spend close to couple of hours doing nothing productive and then leave. Literally they get paid for attendance. And why would anybody to go a farmer’s farm to work and get paid the same amount.

Every other sector is being adversely impacted with this. Industrialist turned Politician who got elected as Guntur MP recently quoted in parliament that when they advertised for 200 Engineering positions they received 2000 applications but when they advertised for 2000 low skilled work force they received mere 200 applications.

Does this impact just agriculture alone, no each and every sector and each and every citizen will be impacted. With increasing input costs prices of the commodities like milk, rice, wheat, pulses, cooking oil, fruits and vegetables will be increased and all of us have to pay more to feed our families. On the other hand industries which depend on agriculture for their raw material like sugar, cotton and other agricultural commodities need to pay more and eventually that is passed on to the end customer.

We can survive without any other sector but not agriculture. We need food to feed this nation. Agriculture cannot and will not stop but evolve out of this.

Hope the new governments here both in state and center will address this problem at most urgency.

Jai kisan