Kalakote: One day token protest was organised by Pradesh Youth Congress under the leadership of Mr. R. S. Pathania, senior Vice-President, at Kalakote with a view to reviewing implementation of Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act. During protest people of the area charged that institution of Gram Sabha has been put into a limbo over here with political masters ruling the roost. Neither the MGNREGA plans nor BPL, IAY and SGRY enlistments are being carried out in Gram Sabhas. Even the job cards and labour payments against the works done are affected on political considerations. Individual cases were pin-pointed by people where payments had not been made good even after the expiry of one year since the execution of respective works by labourers. Senior Congress leader of the area and former M.L.A., Ashok Sharma also addressed the protesting Youth Congress activists and called for a peoples’ movement against the worst-ever reign of corruption and lawlessness in the area. While concluding the protest late in the evening, Mr. R. S. Pathania charged that implementation of MGNREGA in the area has been totally half-hearted, slip-shod and fraught with irregularities, corruption and monitored by political masters. He dwelled, in detail, and educated the people about the various statutory provisions of MGREGA, its poor operationalisation in J & K and the hardships faced by rural people. He added that compulsory statutory provisions of 100 days of job to card-holders, poor response to the card-holders' job demands, payment of unemployment allowance and full wages to card-holders denied work, payment within fifteen days, etc have more or less become hollow slogans. He lamented that the job-guarantee scheme which is brainchild of visionary national youth icon, Rahul Gandhi, has failed to achieve the desired results in the trouble-torn state where unemployed youth have taken to guns and stones. While asserting that early and planned implementation of the flagship programme is a socio-economic and democratic imperative, he first of all proposed that in order to make the scheme a success, the wage rate should be enhanced to Rs, 200.00 from Rs. 110.00 per day. A parallel set of functionaries with separate B.D.O. and separate VLWs should be recruited, trained and tested in a state-of-art way with a view to exclusively plan, run and monitor MGREGA projects. He also called for payment of labour wages through Post office accounts as Post Offices are more readily available in villages than banks.
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