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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | NREGA: Wages are often denied or delayed, with corruption rife-Inayat Sabhikhi

NREGA: Wages are often denied or delayed, with corruption rife-Inayat Sabhikhi

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published Published on Apr 21, 2012   modified Modified on Apr 21, 2012
-The Economic Times
 
Shibu Joseph ( Why I am Quitting my Job, ET, March 29) suggests, tongue-in-cheek, that he should quit the drudgery of corporate life and, instead, enjoy the "freebies" given to the aam aadmi, like the right to work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). 

I am not going to write on behalf of the crores of people who work in this programme, because I am not like them (doing hard physical labour) but I am like Mr Joseph (writing in English to be read in English). 

To borrow from the 24x7 news channel format, where employment guarantee and right to food Bills get debated without a single potential beneficiary of these programmes ever being invited to assert their views in Delhi studios, let's make this entirely theoretical. 

First, to get some factual inaccuracies out of the way; it was said that workers in the NREGA get paid whether they "work or shirk". The NREGA guarantees a hundred days of manual labour, at a notified wage rate to be paid as per the measured output. I am sure that in all forms of corporate life, despite "unrealistic" demands, no one's wages have ever been paid after counting every "meaningless bullet point". 

In spite of NREGA work being measured, most workers are underpaid, with people having been paid as little as 1 per day (in Tonk, Rajasthan). Average wages paid across the country are well below the statutory minimum wage. Getting acknowledgements for work applications is very difficult, and the unemployment allowance is a pipe dream. 

There were also gross overestimations of potential earnings when the article in question said that an NREGA worker is getting paid 155 for six days a week for 52weeks, which is 48,360 a year. 

The NREGA offers a maximum of hundred days of work and the central government has been fighting a protracted battle to keep the real wage capped at 100 per day. In an ideal situation, it is 100 x 100 days - which is 10,000 for a year per household. In most cases, workers get neither 100 days of work nor 100 per day. 

In fact, the government of India is refusing to pay minimum wages on NREGA works and has taken this matter to the Supreme Court (even though the court has maintained earlier that non-payment of minimum wages amounts to forced labour). Increases in state wage rates (Karnataka's 155) have been extracted after enormous pressure by workers' collectives and court rulings. 

I would like to accept the offered invitation to travel to "a village, any village...(where) the government is transforming the "once-industrious folks...into lazy squatters around some village well". 

After being taken to one of the 6,38,365 villages in the country, this writer would like to extend a counter-invitation: not to show that the NREGA is working perfectly, but to show corruption, forged muster rolls, delayed wage payments, low wages and work sites appropriated by higher castes. But the desire would also be to introduce people, who in spite of all this, struggle and fight for the right to work. 

One could go, for instance, to Barkheda, in Bharatpur district of Rajasthan. In a jan sunwai (public hearing) held there during January this year, over 400 people submitted applications for work where government officials claimed there was no work demand. 

One could also go to Pati block in Badwani district of Madhya Pradesh, where the NREGA has reduced migration, given a sense of identity and transformed relationships with power structures. It would be fruitful to travel to Baran in Rajasthan, where Sahariya tribe families have freed themselves from generations of bonded labour and have had a chance at an alternative life because of work under the NREGA. 

One could finish with Vijaypura panchayat in Rajsamand district where a Dalit sarpanch has shown how the work entitlement under NREGA can keep hunger at bay for hundreds of families, and transform barren hills into productive land. 

In 2008, when people were presumably worried about their corporate jobs, one of the foremost reasons our country didn't suffer seriously was because of this massive employment guarantee programme - which doesn't gamble on money but, instead, creates assets and funnels money in a decentralised fashion across the country, to large numbers of some of the poorest people in the world. 

Fannie Lou Hammer, the civil rights activist, famously said, "Nobody's free until everybody's free." Rights denied to one person (or a group), are rights denied to everyone. 

If someone does ever quit his job and becomes an aam aadmi and is then denied the right to work, rest assured we will fully support him to get his guaranteed hundred days of work at the minimum wage! 

(The author works with Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and the National Campaign for People's Right to Information)

The Economic Times, 21 April, 2012, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/guest-writer/nrega-wages-are-often-denied-or-delayed-with-corruption-rife/articleshow/12770692.cms


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