New Delhi, April 1: The Centre today extended its flagship rural job scheme to all 604 districts in the country, promising to reach over five crore households within a year.

But the government’s own report card reveals that it has only provided 40 days of employment on an average to beneficiaries though the scheme promises 100 days of work a year.

Only a 10th of the three crore households that the government says received jobs over the past one year were employed for the full quota of 100 days. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is currently operational in 330 districts.

Announcing the extension of the two-year-old scheme today, rural development minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh called it the “most transparent project” the United Progressive Alliance government had undertaken.

“We have a zero-tolerance policy towards corruption, but it takes time for results to show,” Singh said.

“By the time we complete three years of implementation (the initiative was launched on February 2, 2006), the results will become evident. The scheme is transforming the lives of millions.”

The announcement comes a day after the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) announced the results of a study that indicates that “long-term” projects had received the short shrift under the scheme.

“It (the scheme) can use the labour of people to build ecological assets (and) rebuild and regenerate the environment,” CSE director Sunita Narain said, adding that it should be seen as “the world’s largest ecological regeneration programme”.

Yet, most of the funds have gone into building roads instead of irrigation, water conservation or afforestation projects, the NGO said after a field study across nine states.

It also alleged that most projects started under the scheme were incomplete — a charge confirmed by the Centre’s own report card today. Of the 15.61 lakh projects taken up, only 4.96 lakh (less than a third) have been completed, the Centre admitted.

A preliminary report of the Comptroller and Auditor General, submitted earlier this year, had also picked holes in the government’s claims of success in the scheme’s implementation.

But the scheme has the potential for long-term changes, and this is visible in some villages where it was used for irrigation, said Richard Mahapatra, the lead researcher of the CSE study. In Barmani (Madhya Pradesh), where the scheme was used to dig wells, farmers Rajendra Singh and Nepal Singh have planted wheat — a winter crop — for the first time.

“The area has faced five consecutive years of drought,” Mahapatra said. “But with the wells, farmers are planting winter crops rather than migrate to towns in search of odd jobs nine months of the year.”

But the CSE report claims that irrational wage calculations have made water conservation projects less lucrative than road building. Panchayats are increasingly demanding more roads because road construction gets them more money, Mahapatra said.

The scheme was restricted to 200 districts in its first year. On April 1, 2007, it was extended to another 130. Wages vary from Rs 125 in Kerala to Rs 50 in Gujarat for a day’s work.

This year’s Union budget has allocated Rs 16,000 crore for the initiative.