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Notice (8): Undefined variable: urlPrefix [APP/Template/Layout/printlayout.ctp, line 8]latest-news-updates/the-corruption-of-the-wretched-14365.html"/> LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The ‘corruption’ of the wretched | Im4change.org
Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

The ‘corruption’ of the wretched
-Live Mint
 
No other social sector programme has been criticized for being successful as has the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). So much so that it is not the inefficiency of the MGNREGS that is a problem, but its success that is seen as the reason for several problems facing the country. Even though it is still a small programme with annual spending of less than Rs.35,000 crore, it has been blamed for runaway inflation in the last four years; for raising wages for millions of poor workers; for financial inclusion and last, but not the least, for making India a labour-scarce country from a labour-surplus country. The silent implication, of course, being the programme must be working well.

At last, there is some acceptance of this even by the strongest critics of MGNREGS. And the best proof of this comes from no one else but Surjit Bhalla, who has also acknowledged that MGNREGS does not suffer from any leakages. Bhalla himself admits in his last column(“Avery poor programme”, The Indian Express, 2 March) that, “Estimates are based on the National Sample Survey’s (NSS) 2009-10 survey; this survey had a special set of questions on participation in the programme and the results broadly match the numbers published by the ministry of rural development.” But having accepted that the programme does not suffer from any leakages, he has found a novel way of unearthing corruption in MGNREGS. So he looks at MGNREGS workers and finds that these workers are not only from the Planning Commission-defined poor category, but also from those households that have not been defined as poor by the commission. Of course, the poor are still defined by the same Rs.22 per day yardstick. The obvious conclusion is that any household whose per capita per day consumption is Rs.23 must be corrupt if its members have participated in MGNREGS. As if the fact that you are deemed non-poor at such low levels of consumption is not enough that you must also be branded corrupt because you dared to participate in MGNREGS and earned some money by doing back-breaking work for Rs.90 per day.

Martin Ravallion, the director of the development research group at the World Bank, has already highlighted the flaw in the index created by Bhalla. But there is a bigger and more fundamental problem in the approach of looking at corruption by using the poverty line as the cut-off for programmes which are universal. The poverty line is a post facto statistical construct which is applied on survey data without the household being aware of its status as poor or non-poor. It makes sense to brand a household or its members as being corrupt if they knew they were ineligible and then participated in the programme. But you can’t blame a household for participating in MGNREGS and earning a livelihood when its members do not know whether they are poor or not.

The second problem is with the basic sequencing of events. Since participation in MGNREGS affects consumption, the status of the household should be evaluated before participation in MGNREGS. Almost one-fifth of the households that are non-poor, as seen by the official poverty line, are so only because of their participation in MGNREGS. If not for this small income, all of them will be poor. It is unfair to treat these households as corrupt for having worked in MGNREGS and improved their incomes. So, by Bhalla’s definition, you are honest only if even after having participated in MGNREGS you remain poor.

In fact, a better way to class these households is to treat them as success stories of MGNREGS whereby MGNREGS has enabled them to climb out of poverty. In fact, this number goes up to 50% of households if the poverty line is raised slightly to Rs.26 per day. But even the remaining 50%, who are still non-poor and have participated in MGNREGS, are not rich and corrupt. The average per capita, per day, consumption of these households is less than Rs.1,000 per month per person.

But the contempt for the poor participating in MGNREGS does not end here. These non-poor households have been accused of spending Rs.487 per year, per household, on jewellery (roughly Rs.40 per month). Implicit here is the notion that the poor should not wear any jewellery (which incidentally is not gold or silver) even if it costs less than half of their earning in a single day. In most cases, the jewellery that this money can buy is nothing more than a pair of bangles or hair bands for a daughter going to school. But consuming such necessities invites the danger of being tagged as corrupt.

Unfortunately, it is the success of MGNREGS which is sounding its death knell. Not only has there been a concerted attempt to dilute the Act by delinking it from minimum wages, but also to stifle the programme through bureaucratic means. It is now evident from ministry’s own data which shows that the average number of person days created has come down from 54 days per household in 2009-10 to only 32 days per household by 2011-12. Cuts in budgetary allocations in this year are clear intentions of rolling back this initiative. Sadly, this is happening at a time when the economy created only one million additional jobs as against the target of 60 million.