BJP’s Ramchander Rao slams Congress over MGNREGA renaming row

BJP State president N Ramchander Rao criticised the Congress for protesting against the renaming of the MGNREGA scheme, calling its invocation of Mahatma Gandhi’s name a political drama. Rao alleged that Congress only attached Gandhi’s name to the scheme ahead of the 2009 elections for electoral gain, rather than genuine reverence.

Hyderabad: BJP State president N Ramchander Rao on Tuesday hit back at the Congress over its protest against the renaming of the MGNREG scheme, asserting that the party’s professed love for Mahatma Gandhi was mere political drama.

He said employment guarantee schemes had existed in the country since the 1980s. In 1989, the Congress government launched the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, which was renamed Jawahar Rozgar Samriddhi Yojana in 1999. In 2001, it was changed to Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana, and in 2005 it was rechristened as NREGA, Ramchander Rao said in a post on X.

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“At none of these stages did Congress feel the need to invoke the name of Mahatma Gandhi. It was only when the 2009 general elections approached that Congress suddenly remembered Bapu and renamed the scheme MGNREGA. This clearly exposes how Mahatma Gandhi’s name was used not out of reverence, but for electoral optics,” Ramchander Rao said.