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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Tamil Nadu's MGNREGA Workers Left in the Lurch Due to Delayed Wages, Unused Funds -Divya Karthikeyan

Tamil Nadu's MGNREGA Workers Left in the Lurch Due to Delayed Wages, Unused Funds -Divya Karthikeyan

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published Published on Nov 19, 2017   modified Modified on Nov 19, 2017
-TheWire.in

In 2016-17, pending payments under the employment scheme in the state amounted to a whopping Rs 5,571 crore.

Tiravur, Tamil Nadu:
“I could kill someone,” said Janaki Chinarasu in early June at her home in Tiruvarur, protecting her forehead from the heat with her hands askew. “It’s like the sun god has conspired with the rain god to punish us.”

Chinarasu is a frail, strong-witted woman with a five-year-old on her lap and a husband hovering around, looking for a washcloth to go out to work. She fantasised about her life as a farmer’s wife in the past before the unforgiving drought struck in the summer of 2016. “How we used to accidentally drop rice and then just clean it up. Now we have to eat it from the floor even if a few grains drop,” she said, feet gliding across the red oxide floor of her hut to turn off the gas stove.

Tiruvarur, among other drought-hit districts in Tamil Nadu, is uniquely miserable for holding the position of the district closest to the Cauvery delta. Here, the people are especially bitter owing to the Cauvery water crisis that reached a crescendo last year.

In August 2016, protests erupted in Tamil Nadu after Karnataka did not release Cauvery river water to Tamil Nadu. In October, the Karnataka government, backed by a state assembly resolution, refused to release water to Tamil Nadu in compliance with the Supreme Court directive to release 6,000 cusecs of water for six days. After the final hearing on the issue by the Supreme Court in March, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka presented their appeals on the 2007 Cauvery water dispute tribunal. Karnataka was clear that the share of 2,000 cusecs of water will not be released to Tamil Nadu due to shortages in their own state’s water reservoirs.

The failure of the monsoon was the next big blow to the farmers of Tamil Nadu. Hit by the drought, 254 farmers committed suicide, according to a petition filed in the Supreme Court by farmers associations. But the Tamil Nadu government, in its reply to the court in April 2017, said there were no farmer suicides due to drought in the state.

In Thanjavur, Tiruvarur, Ariyalur, Perambalur and Nagappattinam, farmers took to the streets demanding a drought relief fund as they were unable to repay their crop loans.

Janaki is in a debt trap, one that runs deep. Her silhouette disappeared into the barely-lit kitchen, and she leafed through the lightweight green folder containing the documents that pledged her home to the local moneylender. “We can’t trust the banks, you know. Our two acres of land could fetch us some money if we went for the crop insurance scheme, but now that private banks are involved, the premiums are higher, we have nowhere to go if our crops fail. So the MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) is the only recourse,” she said. “But [it is] all work and no money.”

Delayed payments


Tamil Nadu has forgotten to pay its workers the wages due to them under the MGNREGA scheme. Since 2015, the state had stopped releasing payments. So much so, that in the fiscal year of 2016-2017, the pending dues were at a whopping Rs 5,571 crore.

After a series of continual reminders from the Centre, the state government has finally cleared dues up to September 2017.

Please click here to read more.
 

TheWire.in, 16 November, 2017, https://thewire.in/197539/tamil-nadu-mgnrega-wage-delay-unused-funds/


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