Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu held YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) responsible for withholding of payment of wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MG-NREGS) by the Central government and warned that people would teach the party a lesson for giving the wrong picture that NREGS was replete with irregularities in Andhra Pradesh.
He reiterated that material component under the NREGS worth about ₹3,200 crore was surrendered by the previous Congress government. “Both of them (YSRCP and Congress) are now crying hoarse while A.P. pushed other States down the table by implementing the NREGS in a foolproof manner, devoid of embezzlement of even a single rupee,” he asserted.
Intervening in a short discussion on the NREGS in the Assembly on Monday, Mr. Naidu said the Centre recently released about ₹350 crore towards pending wages under the NREGS and a similar amount would be remitted in a few days.
He said the State had nothing to hide and gave a detailed account of the works done under the scheme to the Central government, which realised that there was no substance in the YSRCP arguments.
Marks for MLAs
Mr. Naidu exhorted the MLAs to do their best to secure good ranks for villages in their constituencies in the seven-star rating programme being introduced by the Department of Panchayat Raj and Rural Development (PR & RD) and said it would be one of the criteria that goes into the assessment of their performance before the elections.
Earlier, responding to the TDP MLAs’ appreciation for making A.P. No. 1 State in the execution of the NREGS works, Minister of PR and RD Nara Lokesh said the star rating for villages consisted of seven parameters -- power supply, gas connections, safe drinking water, vermicompost centres/individual sanitary latrines, CC roads/anganwadi and panchayat office buildings, water tanks and ₹10,000 income per family per month.
The villages would be given star-rating by the year 2019. The target was to develop 12,918 villages, he said.
Lokesh’s charge
Minister of Panchayat Raj and Rural Development Nara Lokesh said in the Assembly on Monday that the YSRCP leaders have written to the Central government for three consecutive years accusing the State of wrongdoing in the implementation of NREGS.
He stated that Kakani Govardhan Reddy, Y.V. Subba Reddy and Y.S. Avinash Reddy sent letters in 2015, 2016 and 2017 in a pre-planned manner to rob the State of its credit for being the frontrunner in providing wage employment to lakhs of workers under the scheme. However, Mr. Lokesh said he could convince Union Minister of Rural Development, PR and Mines Narendra Singh Tomar, who he met personally, that it was a misinformation campaign unleashed by the YSRCP with ulterior motive.
