Devinder Sharma, in the debate “Should MNREGA labour be used for farming?” (October 12), is, in effect, arguing that a section of Indians must be kept at near-starvation levels so that they are forced to abandon their families from mid-March to July and migrate to distant places to serve as quasi-bonded labour for rich farmers. This reminds me of the complaint some years ago by the chairman of a leading engineering company that the IT sector was paying engineers so well that he was finding it a problem to retain them in his company. Should we not rejoice if the Indian people at different levels now have more and better-paying work options? Isn’t that what development is about?
In order to still get the required number of hands, all that an employer (whether farmer or industrialist) has to do is to exceed the pay, facilities and perquisites that a potential employee is getting elsewhere — if necessary by increasing the price of the final products.
Moreover, though the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) can offer up to 100 days of employment in a financial year per household, the average actual employment in 2010-11 per registered household was only 16.5 days. With the average rural Indian household having three 18-year-plus members, this works out to 5.5 days of MNREGA work per adult registered resident per year. How this minuscule MNREGA employment can result in a shortage of agricultural workers is hard to imagine.
Alok Sarkar, Kolkata
Readers should write to:
The Editor, Business Standard,
Nehru House,
4, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg,
New Delhi 110 002,
Fax: (011) 23720201;
letters@bsmail.in
All letters should have a postal address and telephone number