In Gulbarga district, for instance, of the total of Rs150 crore allocated, only Rs50 crore has so far been ultilised. Of the Rs1,700 crore granted to the state under the MGNREGA, only a small part has been utilised.
With just three months left before this financial year draws to a close, the state has fallen far short of optimum utilisation of funds granted to it by the Centre under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).
In Gulbarga district, for instance, of the total of Rs150 crore allocated, only Rs50 crore has so far been ultilised. Of the Rs1,700 crore granted to the state under the MGNREGA, only a small part has been utilised. These facts were disclosed by M Nagendraswamy, director, Directorate of Field Publicity, at a workshop on rural development held at the Bharatiya Vidhya Bhavan on Tuesday.
Nagendraswamy said that in Bidar district, only Rs30 crore has been utilised so far; in Davangere, Rs90 crore has been utilised.
So why are funds allocated to the state under this scheme so poorly utilised?
Jagadeesh Shettar, the state’s minister for rural development and panchayat raj, explained that there were few people in the state coming forward to work under the scheme. He added that the scheme is designed in such a manner that it is not based on allocations, but on projects taken up at the local level. “We need better publicity and wider ground-level communication about the scheme,” Shettar said.
The director-general of the department of audio-visual publicity of the state government, AP Frank Noronha, said that programmes are being undertaken in order to generate better awareness of schemes like the MGNREGA, the National Rural Drinking Water Project (NRDWP) and the Total Sanitation Campaign. A special drive will be taken up, he explained, in five districts of the state, Bidar, Chitradurga, Davangere, Gulbarga and Raichur, to spread awareness of these schemes, between February 21 and March 20. Too late, though, to serve much purpose towards better utilisation of MGNREGA funds this year.
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