Not a guarantee

For those still not sure that the country is headed for elections ahead of the scheduled date in 2009, the government's decision to extend the populist National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP) to all districts in the country (that is, from 330 now to nearly 600) should tell its own story. The NREGP Council recommended on September 20 that the programme be made national in its reach "" a recommendation that no one cared to announce to the country at large. Five days later, Rahul Gandhi led a delegation of Congress general secretaries to the Prime Minister and demanded the same thing "" this time, in the full glare of the arc lights. The government promptly fell in line, and said the extension to another 250-plus districts will be done from the next financial year. If that announcement has been made with staged dramatics six months in advance, the reason can only be the need to project Mr Gandhi and to set the stage for campaigning on the 'aam aadmi' platform.

Political parties are entitled to blow their trumpets on their trademark programmes and to project the leaders they choose, but that does not and cannot take away the questions that have been asked ever since the NREGP was conceived. It is worth recalling what the criticisms were. The first was that the programme flows from a misunderstanding of the kind of employment that people want and that there is limited demand for work that involves breaking stones and carrying headloads of bricks at a construction site. The second was that the government machinery is such that the bulk of the money spent will not reach the intended beneficiaries and that the whole thing would become a giant boondoggle; it would be more cost-effective to work out a straight cash grant for the needy. Judging by different assessments done of the initial experience with the programme, it now seems that both criticisms were on the button.

A survey in Wardha district found that 94 per cent of those who had registered for the scheme were yet to get job cards; a third of them had not got any work at all under the scheme, and the rest had got work for between 10 and 30 days "" and payment for the work was made after as many as 75 days! Another micro-survey in Chhattisgarh's Jashpur district discovered that the state government had simply converted all public works into NREGP programmes, which means that whatever employment is claimed to have been generated is not an additionality. Here the inevitable elements surfaced "" fake muster rolls, large-scale leakages, contractor raj and deep-rooted corruption. And in Gujarat, the Congress has itself alleged (in its criticism of the state chief minister) that the NREGP is not being implemented at all, that only 20 per cent of the rural poor have applied for registration, and only 10 per cent actually got any work.

The initial numbers put out by the rural development ministry said that nearly all the 15 million households who had asked for jobs under the NREGP had been provided jobs. But while the programme provides for 100 days of employment for one member of each poor family in a year, the average worked out to less than one-third of this figure "" which would suggest that either the government is not able to implement the programme effectively, or that the demand for work under the programme is limited. According to the rural development ministry, around 30 per cent of the population in the initial lot of 200 NREGP districts is poor "" yet, nearly two-thirds of the households in these districts have got NREGP job cards made for themselves. That suggests either poor targeting and therefore inflated costs, or a level of poverty in the countryside that is more than twice as high as the official estimate.

All these raise serious questions about the efficacy of spending tens of thousands of crores on a programme that is seen to be performing well below par. Surely, there should be a search for superior alternatives so that rural poverty can be tackled more effectively. But that, it would seem, does not suit the Congress. And so the NREGP will be extended to all districts of the country, with no questions asked or answered. The one question that the Congress should ask itself is: if the NREGP is working poorly, how will it help the party get the votes of the 'aam aadmi'?