Minister for Rural Development and Panchayat Raj and chairman of Cabinet sub-committee on drought and flood H.K. Patil directed Kalaburagi Zilla Panchayat Chief Executive Officer (ECO) P. Anirudh Sravan to ensure labourers, who worked under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, receive compensation for delayed payment of wages. He was speaking at a review meeting here on Friday.
“As per MGNREGA, the payment should be made within 15 days of the work done. Delayed payment should include 0.05 per cent of the wages per day as compensation. If the State government delayed releasing funds, it will release additional funds for compensation. If any officer, be it Panchayat Development Officer of Executive Officer of taluk Panchayat, delays the work, the compensation amount should be recovered from his/her salary,” he said.
He also asked the CEO to issue a circular and warn the officers concerned against the delayed payment.
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Pointing at the menace of middlemen in job scheme payments, Mr. Patil asked officers to ensure that every labourer who actually does work under the scheme would have a bank account of his own to receive the payments.
Mr. Sravan responded that the department was already working on to eliminate middlemen.
“We have conducted a verification process and found around 1 lakh bogus or fake job cards and cancelled them. Around 80 per cent of the genuine job cards have been linked to Aadhaar cards,” he said.
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He also expressed helplessness in getting bank accounts to remaining labourers quickly as banks were reluctant to go to village and open accounts.
Mr. Sravan also spoke about the works initiated under the job scheme, such as brick making and giving the manufactured bricks free of cost to beneficiaries of housing schemes and arched-check-dams and these were widely commended.
Responding to criticisms by K.B. Shanappa on long-pending irrigation projects in the district, Minister of State for Medical Education and Kalaburagi in-charge Sharan Prakash Patil said that the modernisation of Bennithora canal network would be finished within three months.
“The modernisation of the entire canal network taken up at a cost of over Rs. 100 crore is its final stage. It will be ready by March 2017. Over 20,000 hectares of lands could be irrigated by the project,” he said.