News websites have gone to town declaring that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme, or MGNREGA, has received the “highest ever” budgetary allocation this year at Rs 48,000 crore.

Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley declared as much while expressing the government’s intent to reorient the scheme in the speech today.

“Honourable Members would be happy to note that the budget provision of Rs 38,500 crores under MGNREGA in 2016-17 has been increased to Rs 48,000 crores in 2017-18. This is the highest ever allocation for MGNREGA.”

While Jaitley is right, the media could do well to put the budgetary allocation in perspective rather than quoting the minister verbatim. MGNREGA received an allocation of Rs 38,500 crore in last year’s Budget — from that figure, the increase this year comes to about 25 per cent. If you look at the revised estimate, however, the increase is only about one per cent. The Revised Estimate (2016-2017) figure stood at Rs 47,499 crore, so essentially the government added about Rs 500 crore to that figure. However, even if we were to compare Budget to Budget announcements, the increase in terms of percentage is not the “highest ever” this year. In 2009, Pranab Mukherjee as the then finance minister allocated Rs 39,100 crore to the MGNREGA – an increase of 144 per cent from Rs 16,000 crore allocated in 2008-2009. It is also notable that since 2011 onwards, Budget allocation to MGNREGA has either been slashed or remained stagnant. The current increase, however, is the largest in terms of percentage under the Modi government.

Source: Finance Ministry, collated by Meghnad S.