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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | NREGA widens gaps between states by Subhomoy Bhattacharjee

NREGA widens gaps between states by Subhomoy Bhattacharjee

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published Published on Sep 22, 2011   modified Modified on Sep 22, 2011

Five years into the implementation of the right to work programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has the potential to create even sharper division between states than what existed before it was launched.

This is becoming increasingly clear through reports like the second report of the National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations on NREGA, released last week in Delhi by rural development minister Jairam Ramesh. It is a detailed study that tracks the state of performance of the government of India’s largest employment security programme ever attempted.

The report does not say so, but the granular detail in which it narrates the success and failure of the programme in 10 largest states in India shows how the inter-state differences in rural India are building up, basically through the success of NREGA.

This has happened because the programme is becoming more and more successful in states where governance is better. Essentially, therefore, it is making clear that to develop a great outreach programme one needs excellent plumbing. That plumbing is the governance structure of the states.

Consequently, a state that is good in attracting investment from industry is also likely to do better in making NREGA a better show. This is, of course, a necessary condition, but not sufficient. It is possible there could be states that, despite being competent, may not push hard on the right to work.

But the reverse is not true. In other words, it is impossible for a state with a poor governance record to make the programme a success, as the report’s state-wise analysis makes out.

This means states like Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka excel in NREGA outcomes. The hopeful outcome is if the state is even half decent, but has the ability to stick to the course, then too it can come close. But that needs a substantial input from the civil society to correct and guide the mistakes, as has happened in the case of Madhya Pradesh.

Yet if governance structure is so crucial to make NREGA stand out from the cavalcade of anti-poverty programmes that have gone before it, then isn’t it better to use this lesson to create an anti-poverty shot that can work irrespective of the efficiency of the state government?

In other words, we need a move to a cash transfer programme at a national scale as fast as possible. A cash transfer system will eliminate the intermediate role of the lower levels of the government after the first stage. Since this move is built on the lessons learnt from NREGA to graduate to the next stage, there should be no dissonance about the replacement of the programme. The target is to reduce poverty and so the means adopted should not become the block to the movement to that goal.

Let’s look at why this makes sense. The sterling work being done by the clutch of non-governmental organisations, as the report shows, can be broadly divided into two categories. At one level, they are making the landless labourers and, in some cases, even marginal farmers aware of the programme and encouraging them to apply for a job card.

At the other level, the organisations are working with the local government like the block development officers and sometimes the district and state level officers to make them respond to the demand for jobs.

NREGA is distinct from all other government programmes that went before it in that it is demand-driven. This makes it a highly bootstrap-up people-centric strategy. While the other programmes that came before and even some other concurrent ones depend on the cash/quota available with the government to decide how many people can benefit, there is no upper limit in NREGA. If a family can show that it is poor but has no work to survive upon, the government has to provide work within 15 days or provide unemployment allowance. So, NREGA has fixed one part of the problem, which is handing out the poor the authority to demand state intervention.

To make this happen, the report shows the NGOs have to negotiate with the local government to keep, at all times, ready a shelf of projects that can be made available to those who demand jobs. For even swift private sector organisations to develop such a customer focus is tough; to expect the government across the country to do so is a fantastic leap of faith. The alternative then is for the blocks to give out unemployment allowance. As the table shows, most districts are not keen to do this as it reflects badly on their performance.

So, the struggle the NGOs wage with the government is reduced to blocking efforts to reduce the size of the muster rolls, skipping payment of full wages by delaying the measurement of the works done and sometimes plain theft like attempting to give payment in cash instead of through post offices.

States that are smart, respond to the civil society better. In some places like Karnataka, where daily labourers get R150 at plentiful construction sites, the lure of earning R100 from NREGA pales.

Overall, the better states do better for their people in many ways. But where most of the poor live, i.e., states like Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and even Bihar, five years after the passage of the Act, the basics are yet to fall in place. And remember, this is a report card on most of the best equipped NGOs in the sector across the country.

If the net result is the better states are racing away, and the time of some of our most committed social evangelists is spent trying to get the basic architecture up, the answer must surely lie in moving to a plan that relies less on intervention and more on the neutral electronic platform.

The Financial Express, 22 September, 2011, http://www.financialexpress.com/news/column-nrega-widens-gaps-between-states/849796/

Tagged with: NREGA



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