BJP will: increase public investment in agriculture and rural development… take steps to enhance the profitability in agriculture, by ensuring a minimum of 50% profits over the cost of production, cheaper agriculture inputs and credit; introducing latest technologies for farming and high yielding seeds and linking MGNREGA to agriculture.

This entry needs a correction before it can be graded, and the correction matters more than the grade.

This fact-check was imported carrying the promise "MGNREGS reform — ensure 100 days of work actually delivered to rural poor", attributed to the 2014 manifesto. We read the manifesto. It contains no such sentence. MGNREGA appears in it exactly once, in the agriculture section, at the end of a list: the party will enhance farm profitability by "introducing latest technologies for farming and high yielding seeds and linking MGNREGA to agriculture." That is the promise, and it is a narrow one.

The 100 days is not a manifesto pledge from any party in 2014. It is Section 3 of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005: a legal entitlement of every rural household whose adult members volunteer for unskilled manual work, binding on whoever governs. Grading it as a broken election promise would misstate what it is. Grading how the entitlement was met is fair game, and that is what the audits let us do.

Four CAG performance audits of the scheme, all covering 2019-20 to 2023-24, are in our corpus. They were conducted separately, in four states with different governments, and they agree.

On the entitlement itself: in Karnataka, "2 per cent to 4 per cent households were provided employment for 100 days". In Uttarakhand, "only one to four per cent of households received the full entitlement of 100 days of work", with the state averaging 21 days per household per year — of 10.35 to 11.84 lakh registered households, between 4.72 and 6.54 lakh were given work in any year. In Jharkhand the auditors could not compute it at all: "Achievement of 100 days of guaranteed wage employment and representation of women beneficiaries under the Scheme could not be assessed as the prescribed Demand Registers were not maintained."

On what happens when the guarantee fails, the Act provides an unemployment allowance. Maharashtra shows what that is worth in practice: "Out of total unemployment allowance of ₹34.85 lakh computed by NREGASoft, for inability to provide employment during the period 2019-20 to 2023-24, only ₹2,268 was paid." Karnataka's ₹1.28 crore of assessed allowance was likewise unpaid. Compensation for late wages fared no better — Maharashtra's officers rejected ₹5.88 crore of it on grounds of natural calamities, Karnataka's rejected ₹3.29 crore "on incorrect grounds".

There is a demand-side finding worth stating plainly, because it cuts against a simple reading. In Maharashtra, of 117.98 lakh registered households only 21.97 lakh — 19 per cent — demanded employment at all; in Karnataka demand never exceeded 48 per cent of issued job cards. Low delivery of 100 days is partly low demand for it. But the same audits show the records that would let anyone verify demand were missing: Maharashtra had not conducted the five-yearly baseline survey of demand, Uttarakhand found "the register of demand for work was not maintained in any of the selected GPs, making it impossible to compare the work demanded with the work offered", and Jharkhand's registers were absent too. Where demand is not recorded, an unmet demand looks identical to no demand.

On assets — which is where "linking MGNREGA to agriculture" would show up — Jharkhand is stark: of 1,02,68,484 works proposed during 2019-24, 27,96,044 (27 per cent) were completed and 50,21,492 (49 per cent) were incomplete as of March 2024, after ₹2,633 crore had been spent. Maharashtra had 5.03 lakh of 25.72 lakh approved works incomplete and 7.10 lakh not started. Money also moved late: Karnataka's delayed releases cost ₹36.26 crore in penal interest, Uttarakhand's ₹2.03 crore, and Jharkhand released funds 40 to 55 days late with ₹321.84 crore of unskilled wages outstanding as of March 2025.

Accountability mechanisms were the weakest link. Maharashtra's shortfall in conducting social audits ranged between 72.43 and 95.67 per cent of gram panchayats across the five years. Jharkhand's grievance redress was found ineffective, with vigilance cells not constituted.

Four state audits are not the country. What they are is four independent tests of the same statutory promise, in states run by different parties, reaching the same result. The manifesto promise — linking the scheme to agriculture — is not measured directly by any of them; what they measure is whether the scheme it was to be linked to functions as the law requires, and on that the answer is largely no. Our verdict is lacks context: the imported claim was not made, and the entitlement behind it was not met.

We have also withdrawn the imported figures this entry carried — a budget "cut from ₹34,000 cr to ₹38,500 cr", an average of "48 days/year", a "₹1.11 lakh crore" FY21 outlay and a quotation attributed to the Prime Minister — because none of them came with a source we could check.