CSE rebuts govt claim over NREGP

The rural development ministry is taking credit for the fact that no one demanded unemployment allowance under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme.

"Employment was provided to all the people who have demanded work. That is the reason why we did not have to provide the unemployment allowance anywhere, under the provisions of the programme," says Minister for Rural Development Raghuvansh Prasad Singh reviewing a year of the constitutionally mandated programme.

But the NGO Centre for Science and Environment, which studied the programme in several states in the country, rebuts this.

"It is the states which have to provide employment and the unemployment wages under the programme. And they tend to avoid this responsibility. With the Centre receiving the numbers from them, these kind of instances are missed out," Richard Mahapatra, coordinator, Natural Resource Management and Livelihoods, CSE, told Business Standard.

Saying that the unemployment allowance was certainly an indicator of the programme performance, Richard said that in several parts of states including Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, where the CSE had conducted field studies, the compliance of the norms was not evident.

"Forget the 15-day period by which unemployment allowance should be provided, in several places where unemployment under NREGP is clear, no unemployment wage was ever paid to the people who demanded employment," Richard said.

The CSE study also shows that people are not aware of their entitlements under the Act. "People are never informed about their rights under the programme. They do not even know that they have to demand for work apart from getting the job cards," Richard said.

"There is no awareness among the rural poor that NREGP is a demand driven programme," he added.