A betrayal once again

All is far from well in the much-touted National Rural Employment Guarantee Act

Prasenjit Chowdhury Chhattisgarh

Certain obstacles remain before Indians can truly bask in the glory of Brand India. One such is the poor indigent in the country, who keep springing from under the red carpet of market-liberalisation, a raucous majority that refuses to shut up. What’s more, each has a vote. Occasionally as in 2004, they reject the pundits’ claims of economic growth and of Hinduism under danger. The new government came with assurances of “economic reforms with a human face”, the flagship for which came with the blessings of the Congress President, Sonia Gandhi. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was a massive initiative that ensured that beginning with the most under-developed districts of this country 100 days of employment will be guaranteed to each household in an year at the existing minimum wage level.

It would truly be a Herculean task to ensure that the Act meets its stated objectives, given not only the magnitude of the project but the overwhelming scepticism that greeted the Act from the right- thinking liberal economists and policy makers from the Planning Commission. The Ministry of Rural Development that brought the Bill in the Parliament, then commissioned a survey team composed scholars from Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Delhi School of Economics to visit few of the districts where the Act has been brought into effect and study the problems that it faces. This author was part of the team that visited Chhattisgarh, the resource-rich state carved out of southern Madhya Pradesh.

Poverty is all-pervasive here. The populace is engaged in working in the mines, or in subsistence activities including agriculture and gathering forest products, especially tendu leaves required by the beedi- making industry and tora seeds. There is vulnerability of livelihood and seasonal unemployment. Landlessness is chronic. The NREGA was intended also as a replacement to the state sponsored anti-Naxalite militia, the infamous and misnamed Salwa Judum (peace march). On display was the visible lack of democratic institutions through our travels in the state, beginning from the northern district of Sarguja and the southern districts of Bastar and Dantewada. Though all three districts witnessed Maoist presence, the latter two were considered the strongholds of the movement.  The idea was also to contrast the work proceeding in administration controlled region in the north with that in the south, where there was clear evidence of parallel administrative units of the Maoists.