AGARTALA: While reviewing the rural employment schemes including MGNREGA, Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar asked Chief Secretary Sanjeev Ranjan to write to NITI Aayog asking it to hand over the responsibility of conducting BPL survey task to the state if they (NITI Aayog) failed to do it at periodic intervals.
Sarkar opined since BPL assessment had not been done in periodical manner, in many cases the real poor people were getting deprived of their legitimate rights. He directed district magistrates to create greater opportunities for employment in the rural areas.
Addressing a meeting of the Tripura State Employment Guarantee Act on Thursday evening, Sarkar said that the central government was reducing funds for employment generation and asset creation in the rural areas despite Tripura successfully creating 80 days’ wage employment in the last financial year under MGNREGA.
“The Centre has barely allocated funds to suffice 42 man-days this year in MGNREGA,” he said adding that Centre now directly sends wages to beneficiaries from Delhi. But in the shadow of these, they have reduced funds under all heads of wage employment including material components.
“The central agency has been entrusted for periodical BPL survey, they were not doing it properly. There was no report after last conducted survey in 2011. As a result, latest status of BPL families was not known. By the many of those families might have got elevated out of the BPL bracket while many others need to be included as BPL beneficiaries, but there is no latest BPL survey report for the purpose,” Sarkar said. UNI
