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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Diary of Digging Dirt

Diary of Digging Dirt

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published Published on Oct 23, 2009   modified Modified on Oct 23, 2009

Why would a politician turn cheerleader for those trying to dig dirt against the men and women who form the final but vital link in his political supply chain - the sarpanches or village heads?

Perhaps to show his commitment to the government program he owes his job to.

This month, Bhilwara in Rajasthan saw something best described as 'social service' meets 'crack investigation': around 1500 people voluntarily gathered and trudged across the district to run a check on the job guarantee program. The exercise was called a 'social audit' and among its supporters was the Rural Development Minister and local Congressman C P Joshi. Joshi, as is well known, lost an election but still won a place in the Union Cabinet courtesy the success of NREGA in his home state. This perhaps obliged him to put aside local political anxieties - what if a Congress linked sarpanch was caught embezzling NREGA funds? - for the sake of higher political symbolism.

A symbolic, strategic act for the minister, but for those who struggled to make employment guarantee a reality, and who now struggle to make it work - and work well - the social audit was a crucial experiment.

Here is some background to understand why: dismissed in its formative years as an ineffectual money guzzling fiscal deficit ballooning exercise of 'making the poor dig holes and fill them', this year NREGA found grudging acknowledgement as a program  powerful enough to both win the UPA a second term and buffer industry from recession by boosting rural demand. This view, of course, comes from those who debate NREGA but do not need it. In fact, NREGA is that rare rural program which evokes instant recognition in urban India. Quick test: expand the acronyms PMGSY, SGSY, NREGA.  Now you know what I mean.

Crude as it may be, the simplest reason why NREGA grabs so much attention is big money. 39,100 crores may be pittance compared to India's oil bill but it is large enough to make NREGA India's biggest ever social sector program, tracked by everybody from grassroots activists, FMCG companies, ecologists, macroeconomists, feminists, all kinds of politicians, all kinds of planners, each of them asking different questions, but one common to all: where is the money going?

The best way to find an answer is a social audit.

But like much else in NREGA, social audit is a work in progress. Rajasthan has seen five social audits by civil society groups, led by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan. Almost each of them faced stonewalling by officials and resistance by sarpanches, that in Jhalawar, even turned violent.

In contrast, Andhra Pradesh has been hosting quieter and more effective audits. An MKSS activist works with the government to run a government funded but civil society led collaborative movement of accountability.

Inspired by Andhra, Rajasthan has just set up a social audit directorate that will work closely with civil society groups to train people in carrying out social audits. Some of them will become regular auditors, officially called 'Block Resource Persons', but ideally less official and more resourceful, and crucially brave and independent. Tough call, but to start with, the government shortlisted around 600 people and sent them to Bhilwara to put the idea to test.

And so on October 30, along with the 600 BRPs, roughly another one thousand volunteers - a majority from Rajasthan, but some from other states - converged at a community centre in Bhilwara. Three days of briefing later, carved out into smaller teams or tolis, about 135 in all, they set off for different panchayats in the district.

Before I proceed further, here is a disclaimer: I was not just an observer but a participant of one of the teams, stationed not far from Bhilwara town, in a panchayat called Baran.

The team itself was a motley mix: a tailor, a former soldier, an ex-sarpanch, a small contractor, a rural management student, a woman social worker, and others, all united in the search for the fudged job card, the missing muster roll, the bill that was inflated. This meant hard work: to start with, we had to pore over the panchayat records - project plan, project budget, worker rolls, wage payments, material bills, transaction vouchers. Together they often ran into a hundred pages for a single project alone. And Baran had 35 projects.

If this wasn't tedious enough, the paper trail had to be matched on the ground by spot inspections - made on foot. No, the long walks under a harsh sun did not always seem welcoming. Yes, they were almost always worth it. In village Eklingpura, digging earth along an incline had created a hollow that was filled with water despite the low rain this year. Making the sight more surreal was a buffalo cooling itself - how many humans, let alone animals in Rajasthan have such good luck? If the 'pond' was evidence of what NREGA money could create, elsewhere proof of how easily it could disappear through cracked embankments, unsteady foundations, gravel roads with no gravel.

Despite the 'learning', as the days went by, I despaired: it seemed humanly impossible to cover full ground. Both in terms of scale and complexity, NREGA work defied easy investigation. Thirty five projects, 1100 workers, 2 crores sanctioned, 78 lakhs spent, all in one panchayat - when the supervising engineer privately complained about his workload, I almost nodded in empathy.

In a moment like this, it is easy to succumb to the seduction of direct cash transfers: take a portable machine to the village, give the poor a card to swipe, and whoosh, in one swift move, the cash is transferred to the poor, and poverty ends. No big program, no burdensome bureaucracy, no possible leak. Except, how do you identify who gets to swipe? Obviously, for that you need an 'official' poverty survey, which can neither escape 'bureaucracy' nor 'corruption' nor 'errors'.

The hard truth is no social sector program can work out of thin air. Besides, simply at a conceptual level, what's better: handing out dole to the poor, or making them strong enough to not need it, by raising both personal incomes and public assets?

NREGA sets out to go beyond dole, beyond short term distress, for something more sophisticated and long term: public investment flowing into villages that improves water, soil and connectivity, and in turn, improves life.

The bad news from Bhilwara is this may not happen any time soon. Everybody in the villages knew NREGA - but as something that got them work and money, not 'gaon ka vikaas'. In village Raghunathpura, five lakhs were spent on building a quixotic embankment that even villagers pointed out was of no use. So, why did the village council approve the project? Blank looks were exchanged, till someone spoke up: the village council had never met.

NREGA trusts the village and its institutions to run the program. A big leap, some argue. Others say, it is risky. In Bhilwara, I saw it was both. In a public hearing, a woman spontaneously spoke out against false attendance, despite being already beaten up once for doing so. Unlikely that she would make it to Jaipur to make her voice heard. In her own village she stood a better chance. Panchayati Raj may not be perfect but at least it is proximate to people - the politics, the contestations, even the corruption.

The social audit itself threw up several instances of it. The most talked about was a sarpanch who swindled a lakh and thirty thousand, but once caught, returned the money. When did that last happen in your municipal board?

I am sure for every sarpanch caught, many others got away. But that would be missing the big picture. For more than a week, the audits teams struggled for a 'big catch', and journalists spied on them for the 'big scoop'. For the local papers, the social audit was a 'good story', and that itself is not bad.

No doubt, NREGA is high on idealism, not just in vision, even in working details. It asks for information boards to be put up at work sites; names and wages of workers displayed on village walls. In Bhilwara, we found boards but often no information. Painted walls but few who read them. The social audit itself contains this duality. It is a unique and pathbreaking idea - which other government program opens itself to this form of scrutiny? But even unique ideas face common problems. In this case, a basic one being how to find the right people? The trainee auditors, or BRPs, in Bhilwara were mostly energetic and sincere volunteers  but some, as it turned out, were here simply because they had been deputed by their department.

Like everything human, NREGA falls short of the ideal, but that is not to say it does not work.

Six months ago, on election eve, not far from Bhilwara, in a village in Rajasamund, a young man effusively praised NREGA. He told me he had been sacked from a diamond company in Surat, but just when he lost hope and came back home, he found he could survive in the village, thanks to the employment guarantee.

This time around, in Bhilwara, I found his polar opposite: an old man who angrily spat and cursed NREGA. He turned out to be a big farmer, with 50 bighas of land, who could not understand why the government had to guarantee 100 rupees for 100 days of work. It was a conspiracy to kill the farmer, he said. Why would people work on farms for less?

It is not my case that the Indian farmer be stressed. But surely isn't the charge that NREGA is 'distorting labour markets', as some economists now make, simply an inverse way of saying the poor are finally finding fair work and fair wages?


NDTV, 19 October, 2009, http://www.ndtv.com/news/blogs/a_fine_balance/diary_of_digging_dirt.php
 

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