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The Union government on 17 May 2020 injected an extra ₹40,000 crore into the national rural jobs programme, extending a helping hand to millions of rural poor, as well as urban migrant workers returning to villages. This takes the total yearly allocation for the scheme to ₹1.01 trillion a record since it was started in 2006 up from ₹61,500 crore set in the Union budget. The expansion of the Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), announced by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, comes nearly two months after the government raised the scheme’s wages from ₹182 a day to ₹202. MGNREGS guarantees 100 days of work in a financial year to a rural household whose adult members volunteer for unskilled manual work.