Chandigarh, Dec 30 || Punjab Finance Minister Harpal Cheema on Tuesday launched a scathing attack on the BJP-led Union government, accusing it of systematically dismantling the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme and stripping the poor of their right to a livelihood.
Speaking in the Vidhan Sabha in support of a resolution against the changes and the renaming of the MGNREGA scheme to ‘Viksit Bharat -- G GRAM G’, Cheema labelled the step as an “assault on stomachs of the marginalised”.
During his address, the Finance Minister read a poignant letter from a woman worker, Charanjit Kaur, which highlighted the fears of thousands of rural labourers. Kaur’s letter expressed the anxiety that changing rules and centralised village lists would deprive children of education and the elderly of medicine.
Cheema emphasised that by centralising the scheme and moving to complex mobile-based attendance, the Union government is snatching away the “guarantee” of work that was once the backbone of rural survival.