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.

It was clear that the programme had not reached the people. Leave aside assessing whether the Act was being properly implemented, we found that people were hardly aware of the Act and its provisions, despite our visit coinciding with the gram swaraj week. The Act itself benefited the local officials and elected representatives of the local self-governments. Since the payment is done according to task rate, that is, according to the task undertaken in a specified period of time, say a week or fortnight, at the worksite, it left the system vulnerable to a lot of corruption. The engineer responsible for the evaluation of work would fill in his own measurement and declare the task insufficient for the minimum wage, while on the muster roll the amount paid would still be the entire minimum wage rate. The muster rolls were not open to verification to any of the workers who were unaware of the Right to Information Act, and remained completely oblivious to the whole manipulation. There was no pukka muster roll being maintained at the worksite and there was no mate at the worksite, in violation of the necessary prerequisite in the Act. Other facilities like drinking water, medical supplies or a crèche for the kids were also conspicuously absent. Before the beginning of the work at a worksite in Piparsaut, Sarguja, a well was dug up by the Panchayat for providing drinking water to the workers at a nearby spot. The well was one foot deep. At the same site we encountered episodes of underemployment where most of the workers were being paid Rs 6-13, way below the minimum daily wage of Rs 60. The corruption was even visible in the selection of work and even those who would be employed at the worksite. But what was abominable was how virtually every one from the local political players to the local bureaucracy to the engineers was shamelessly abetting each other in denying not only the people what was rightfully theirs but also in failing the state in its functions and duties.

What about the Maoist-controlled part, where the ideology of the movement purported to offer an ideological and practical alternative to the dysfunctional official state? The Act and the people it intended to protect were being exploited by a different set of players. In a village in the southernmost district of Dantewara, a local Communist Party of India (CPI) leader was being elected to the post of the sarpanch for the post of 20 years unopposed. This mystery of how CPI got elected in an area where its organisation is not strong was solved by coaxing the villagers for further information. It transpired that the local unit of the CPI (Maoist) threatened all other prospective candidates, while the victor promised a percentage of the money allocated from state and central schemes such as the NREGA. While the mystery of the success of CPI’s success in a state where it does not have as strong a cadre base as compared to other districts was certainly puzzling, the answer provided by the villagers after much reassurances and candidly was that the local unit of CPI (Maoist) threatened all other prospective candidates and in return the latter would pay them a percentage of the money which was allocated to him from state and central schemes like the NREGA. The so- called “liberated zones” had not seen much developmental work barring few public constructions and the local cadre of the Maoists were known to collect money from all local works being undertaken (even those by the villagers) in the district.

The third player in this vitiated atmosphere is the Salwa Judum (SJ): the forces that truly represent, in the words of Arundhati Roy, “the end of imagination”. This is the least thought out response state could come in response to a movement that has deep socio- economic manifestation. To arm an untrained group of villagers without preparing any infrastructure for relief and rehabilitation has led to serious crisis where the situation eerily has come close to that of a civil war. These SJ camps being funded through the NREGA allocations. There were similar conditions of ignorance about the Act and their constitutional rights under it.

Those refusing to get drawn into either side are the constant target of both armed sides. Landless agricultural labourers, tribals and other rural poor are by now accustomed to having their houses burnt down, their villages wiped out, and they are displaced by one or the other combatant side. For this multitude, universal human rights and the directive principles of their constitution are just something that is meant for others. A life of dignity is not possible when the guardian state is being betrayed by its own custodians. The NREGA or any other device can be extremely sound in theoretical grounding, but when pushed into the rough and tumble of the terrain of the world’s largest democracy, turns into yet another sham. If this is the human face of economic reforms, then what is the inhuman face?