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The Lie Of The Land -Pavithra S Rangan
-Outlook

In MP’s Bundelkhand region, a sarpanch-babu nexus means NREGA benefits dry up for the poor

The Paper Trail

How social sector cuts are playing out in one of India’s poorest parts

    For the first time ever, in 2014, Rs 1,000 cr, of a sanctioned Rs 4,000 cr budget for NREGA, not given to MP

   In 2015, only a small part of the budget released for two months. NREGAtop officials say funds always given for at least six months.

   Government records show an average of 68 days work per person per year;on the ground, many haven’t worked 50 days in five years

    In nearly empty villages, after majority migrate for work, all NREGA work performed by machines

   Wages found credited to accounts of government employees and even the dead. District officials refuse to part with data; say it’s been erased from their computers.

***

A group of them, about 20 old and young men, are engrossed in a game of cards under the banyan tree, shielded from the two o’ clock sun on a May afternoon. No distractions here, they take five minutes to finish the round of teen patti. “If you’d come here three days later, the village would be nearly empty,” says 35-year-old Lala Ram. “Our break is alm­ost over and we are going back to Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan or wherever the thekedar decides to take us this time.”

They had just returned, less than 10 days ago, for the seasonal break after their four-month migratory season. The‘able-bodied’ in every Dalit household in Kalothra village, Tikamgarh district, are out for at least eight months a year. They work in different parts of the country as daily-wage labour. In a majority of the district’s 800-odd villages, it’s only the very old and the very young—those incapable of doing any manual labour—that stay back. The neighbouring Nora, Asati and Sendri villages are already almost empty.

Thesituation in Tikamgarh, one of Bundelkhand’s six poverty-ridden districts, is no exception, the entire region is starved of natural resources, industry, healthcare facilities, sanitation, even water. The livelihood guarantee sch­eme, NREGA, came to Tikamgarh in its very firstphase, in 2006, in the backdrop of a long spell of drought that wasted the region between 2001-08. Distress migration, a common phenomenon across Bundelkhand, increased significantly after the drought.

Interestingly,government records of NREGA implementation in the region, since its inception, reflect an impeccable growth of livelihood opportunities in these districts. On an average, Rs 310 crore is spent on wages and material cost every year in Bundelkhand, with close to 40,000 works being sanctioned, and nearly 30,000 of them being completed.

But if most villages are almost empty through the year, with the entire working population migrating out, who then is demanding this NREGA work?Who is undertaking them? And who, in fact, is completing them? “The JCBmachines do all the work here. From digging out mud to mixing cement, laying roads, every­thing is done by machines,” says 40-year-old GorelalBanskar in the Lidhora Taal village. “Last year, when I came back for afew days after working at a construction site in Faridabad, the road here and the graveyard were being built by the JCB and a few relatives of the sarpanch.”

Across villages, hardly anybody knows about works being sanctioned in their village and neither are they informed about job opportunities. “In the last five years put together, I got a maximum of 50 days of NREGA. If we had got work here, why would all of us migrate?” asks Ramesh Ahirwar, who takes 12-year-old son and wife on his wage-hunting trips, leaving behind two very young daughters with hisparents in Asati village. “The sarpanches here spend lakhs to win the election. During the five years they are in power, they ensure they earnten times as much.” True to his word, uniformly sparkling white Bolerosare parked outside most sarpanch houses—sticking out in a region where even owning a bullock cart is an indicator of opulence.

“If we didn’t go out and depended on NREGA alone, we wouldn’t even be able to buy five kgs of atta. Our children would die of hunger,” says Lala Ram. “When we leave, we borrow Rs 1,000 from the upper castes here and give it to our parents to buy food for them and the children. When we come back, after 3-4 months, we pay an interest of Rs 500 for every Rs 1,000.Still it leaves some money with the family to sustain them for the nextfew months while we are away.”

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