NAC to meet after July 7

Meet to take up draft of a national rural employment Bill

The National Advisory Council (NAC), chaired by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi will have its first meeting between July 7 and 10 and will discuss the draft of a national rural employment guarantee Bill prepared by Jean Dreze. If the Bill is cleared by the meeting, it will be forwarded to government for further action.

The meeting will also discuss the formation of working groups in four areas that Gandhi has selected for effective and deep intervention by the NAC immediately - agriculture, health, education and nutrition.

The meeting will take place at 2, Motilal Nehru Place, which is where the NAC secretariat will be housed. The sprawling building was being spruced up and was likely to be handed over to the NAC in the first week of July, party sources said.

The NAC is seen as the body for professional intervention by civil society to give direction to the common minimum programme, which is essentially a political document.

The NAC, which was set up after intensive consultations between Gandhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P Chidambaram, will replicate a Rajiv Gandhi Foundation-like structure that will give advise to the government that could be critical of government policy but will be Left-liberal in nature, a reflection of the political persuasion of the members hand-picked for their intensive expertise in areas of work.

Dreze of the Delhi School of Economics, for instance, has done extensive work on poverty and access to education and is currently a petitioner in a case in the Supreme Court on the right to education.

Mirai Chatterjee, who has been a member of several non-government organisations (NGOs) involved in gender issues, has worked out a scheme for health insurance for unemployed rural women.

AK Sivakumar and Madhav Chauhan (through an NGO called Pratham) have also done extensive research on the political economy of education. Jayaprakash, a trained doctor and a former IAS officer is researching livelihood and the law.

Aruna Roy is a Magasaysay award winner in the field of right to information at the level of the panchayats. Sam Pitroda, V Krishnamurthy, and NC Saxena have all been in the Planning Commission at one or other time and therefore understand the system.

Interestingly, Sivakumar who works in Karnataka had made presentations to Congress chief ministers at their meeting in Mount Abu.

He was earlier a PhD student working under Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, at Harvard.

In order that the NAC has teeth and is not just considered another society of jholawallahs (do-gooders), the Cabinet Secretary has issued orders giving it administrative sanctity. It will derive its authority from the Prime Minister's Office, which will pay for its activities.

Former rural development secretary Arun Bhatnagar, who was a contender for the Cabinet secretary's post but was passed over, is himself a seasoned hand at administration and will ensure the NAC pushes the right buttons so that the proposals it suggests are incorporated into the government's official charter.

A similar exercise - of incorporating suggestions from civil society so that the India that often goes unrepresented in officialdom - was undertaken by VP Singh when he became PM and drafted NGO-academics like Rajni Kothari into government via the Planning Commission. That exercise yielded very little by way of an NGO interface in government. The NAC is determined to succeed.