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Employment guarantee scheme under scanner after hunger death

A landless labourer dies on Christmas day after going without food for five days. Neither he nor his wife, who was a job card holder under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, knew they could demand work or avail of unemployment benefits as a right It was a death that could have been avoided. Kishen Singh, a 45-year-old landless labourer, died of hunger in Champakheda village in south Rajasthan. What is tragic is that Kishen and his wife Ganga, a job card holder under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), were unaware that they were entitled to work or unemployment benefits as a right, under the Union government?s flagship scheme.

Champakheda is located 75 km from Bhilwara where an awareness campaign and social audit of the NREGS was carried out by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in October 2009. The message, it now seems, never reached Kishen?s village despite the fact that a wall painting extolling the benefits of the NREGS can be seen on the Chittorgarh-Udaipur highway, only 11 km away.

The NREGA, which was recently renamed the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA, promises 100 days of work every year to one adult member of every rural household, at a minimum wage. Launched in 2005, it has come under criticism for delayed wage payments, corruption, non-issuance of job cards and use of funds for non-permissible activities.

Meanwhile, the district and state government authorities have been claiming that Kishen died of tuberculosis, not starvation. But no one denies the fact that his family of six -- his wife, three married children and three children below the age of 12 -? had not eaten for five days. The younger children banked on the midday meals they got at the government school they attended.
 Villager Khemraj Chowdhary, who gave the family 10 kg of flour early in December, said it was a lapse on their part. We did apprise the sarpanch of the family?s plight but did not explain to the family that they could have demanded work under the NREGA,? he said, adding that the sarpanch had agreed to meet Ganga on December 5 but had not kept the appointment.

It was a group of women from a neighbouring village who first noticed the family's plight as they worked with Ganga during late-November. ?We were cutting grass in a nearby village and for three days we noticed that Ganga had nothing to eat. We used to share food with her every day. We later told an NGO about her condition and they
 gave the family 10 kg of flour,? said Mangi Bai of Bhilon-ka-Kheda village. She said the family had no food the day Singh died and that the women of the village had collected food for them and had given them some flour.

The NGO Shruti works with the issue of the NREGS but admits it never realised that it had to explain the benefits and rights of the scheme to the couple. Ganga says they are illiterate and cannot read at all, though the children now study at the nearby government school. Ganga knows nothing about the NREGA even though she holds a job card and has worked under the scheme in the past.

Indeed, Ganga's job card shows that she worked for 27 days under the scheme, between August 1 and September 30, and earned Rs 2,748. Despite having another 73 work days, Ganga was unaware that the NREGA entitled her to demand work and that if work was not given to her she could demand unemployment benefits. To her, work under the NREGA was just another 'sarkari kaam' (government work).

In August I was told that there was government work nearby, so I went and worked there. But I did not know I could demand work from the government. I would have gladly worked and earned money, since my husband has been ill for over two years,?
she said. She added that she always believed she could earn money from this 'sarkari kaam' only when the panchayat said there was work.

Nikhil Dey of the MKSS says it is the duty of the government to disseminate information about the NREGA, which it has failed to do. ?It is mandatory to spread awareness about this Act throughout the state, but this has not been done. There are
several cases that we have come across in the state where the villagers do not know their basic rights under the NREGA, Dey says.

A senior Rajasthan government official said lack of awareness about the NREGA among the rural population was 'unfortunate'. He said the government was taking the issue seriously and would increase awareness about the scheme and its benefits.

For its part, the Union Ministry of Rural Development has recently invited applications from former civil servants and judges, established academicians and social activists from across the country to join a panel of 'eminent citizens' to objectively evaluate the NREGA that, it admits, has been plagued by complaints of sloppy execution and graft.

After a screening process, 100 citizens will be selected and sent out across the country to periodically assess whether the scheme?s benefits are reaching the rural poor. Each of the 100 citizens selected for the panel will be allotted one district to monitor; they will have to spend at least six days there.

The objective of this exercise is to encourage greater public participation in making the scheme more accountable and effective,? said a ministry official who did not want to be identified. We put out the advertisement at the end of December, and have received 150 applications so far.

The Union ministry has come up with a budget estimate of Rs 55 lakh per year for the new monitoring scheme.