Rahul Gandhi with Congress MPs after meeting Manmohan Singh in New Delhi on Thursday. Picture by Rajesh Kumar

New Delhi, Feb. 28: Rahul Gandhi and his team of 10 today met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to voice concern over the UPA government’s flagship scheme — the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

The Congress is awaiting P. Chidambaram’s announcement of an expansion of the scheme in the budget tomorrow.

Rahul’s prime concern was that the scheme, which now covers 330 districts and is expected to extend to another 300, was not benefiting its intended targets — the “poorest and most backward” regions.

Instead, the economically and socially better-off states had taken advantage of it, making its application “rather skewed”.

The Amethi MP cited Congress-ruled Andhra Pradesh as an example of how the “programme was successfully rolled out” with the backup of IT infrastructure and an institutionalised mechanism of social auditing.

Rahul, who had earlier appealed to the Prime Minister to universalise the scheme, felt it would have to be “minutely fine-tuned” if it was to live up to its name in letter and spirit.

After meeting the Prime Minister with a team of 10 other young MPs this morning, he told the media the delegation had asked for centralised monitoring of the act and better co-ordination among states.

“It is not fair to lambast the act. It is good in some areas and bad in some others,” he said, asked to respond to the criticism in a report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG).

Manmohan Singh

Among the points Rahul raised were:

*Since the Centre has bankrolled 90 per cent of the scheme, it should monitor how state governments use the funds and devise ways to help them learn from each other’s experiences in a “spirit of cooperation and not confrontation”

*Non-Congress governments were taking credit for the “positive spin-offs” of the legislation, but whenever there was a dust-up over fund defalcation or false rolls, the Centre had to face the music.

Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi stressed there was “no political element” in the meeting, but sources conceded the sub-text was the UPA was not getting the credit it deserved.

*Quick release of funds.

Sources said the Prime Minister would speak to the rural development minister in a day or two and get back to Rahul and his team, which included Milind Deora, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Tejaswini Seeramesh, Jitin Prasada and Sandeep Dikshit.

Congress ministers later sought detailed briefings on the Singh-Rahul meeting from the young MPs.

If pushing the social agenda was one part of Rahul’s blueprint for the Congress, the other was talent scouting.

Rahul last week set up a “talent search committee” to look for “leaders” from the National Students’ Union of India and the Youth Congress, which he supervises as general secretary.

Union minister and Bengal Congress chief Priya Ranjan Das Munshi heads the committee.