Government is committed to strengthen MGNREGA: FM

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Government is committed to strengthen MGNREGA: FM

The Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that the government is committed to strengthen the rural jobs scheme MGNREGA and it has allocated Rs 37,000 crore this fiscal, which is the highest ever budgetary support to the scheme. Addressing a MGNREGA Sammelan, organised to mark the completion of 10 years of the scheme, he said, government will boost the public spending in other rural sectors also like road, electrification, health, education and irrigation to spur the growth as private sector is not contributing to it as desired.

Allaying the apprehensions in some quarters that MGNREGA will be scrapped or will be replaced with some other scheme, Jaitley said, in coming years more funds will be provided to rural jobs scheme as this is basically a demand driven programme. The Finance Minister also underlined that this is the first year, where resources allocated in the budget for MGNREGA or other social sector schemes will not see any cut, as was the practice for the past several years to prune the planned expenditure affecting development. Jaitley said in the wake slowdown in global economy, India has to boost the public spending in rural sectors to economically empower the people to achieve higher growth targets.