MUMBAI (Reuters) – India will spend 860 billion rupees ($9.94 billion) on its flagship rural jobs guarantee programme in the next financial year, according to the federal government’s budget documents released on Saturday.
The allocation is unchanged from the revised 860 billion rupees outlay for the ongoing year ending March 31.
India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the government’s annual budget amid slowing growth in Asia’s third-largest economy and rising global uncertainties.
The slowdown has been marked by weakness in urban consumption and lackluster private sector investment, although the rural economy, which the employment scheme is aimed at, is showing signs of recovery.
Under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), first introduced in 2006, citizens can enrol for work such as building roads, digging wells or creating other rural infrastructure and receive a minimum wage for at least 100 days each year.
India’s unemployment rate stood at 7.8% in December 2024, marginally higher than 7.7% the previous month, data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy showed.
In absolute terms, the number of unemployed persons increased from 34.7 million to 35.6 million, the data showed.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Kalra; Editing by Sumana Nandy)
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