Phantom Wages, Ghost Houses, and the Case for G Ram G
I have followed India’s rural employment programmes long enough to know how promises dissolve into paperwork. The latest MNREGA audit in Karnataka confirms what many of us suspected: the system is riddled with fraud, mismanagement, and bureaucratic improvisation. The CAG report reads like a catalogue of civic absurdities. Payments were made for houses that do not exist. Wages were credited to beneficiaries who should not have received them. Check dams and afforestation projects resemble ruins more than functioning assets. Meanwhile, most rural families received between one and thirty days of work, far below the 100 days promised. MNREGA limps along, dragging behind it a train of unpaid workers, incomplete projects, and official indifference. Adding insult to injury, prominent Congress leaders seem determined to defend the very mechanisms that allowed this mismanagement. Rahul Gandhi insists the scheme is fundamentally sound, and Siddaramaiah calls the lapses “technical issues.” Probabl...
