K S Gopal, former member of Central Employment Guarantee Council and now with Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, tells Sreelatha Menon why Jairam Ramesh’s NREGA 2.0 may not be effective. Edited excerpts:
The rural development ministry feels the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) would reach more people if there was a way of capturing and registering demands for work.
The rural development ministry’s diagnosis is wrong. It is not a demand problem but a supply problem. It is not that the NREGA worker’s demands for work are not being registered. It is that work is not being provided. Merely issuing fiats from Delhi won’t help. Presume for a moment that we are registering every demand. And the demand letter goes to the district collector. Would the collector be liable? Even if he opens work on demand, what if he has no money to pay? Will the ministry be liable? If the official in the panchayat or collectorate decides to acknowledge every demand and create work for the applicant, he may say there is work on the top of a mountain or some inaccessible place, where no one can go. Or he may just open work for a day and his duty would be done. Is that enough? The law doesn’t say you have to provide work to an applicant for 20 days at a stretch. But it should be a few days at a stretch or what money would he earn? So the truth is that it is a problem of supply.
How can the Centre give funds without proof that it is being spent?
Get your system right. A Bihar official once said money was held up by the ministry because accounts for Food for Work done years ago were not closed! In Orissa they stopped work because funds were not being sent for want of utilisation certificates. So why not penalise the official who fails to provide these certificates? And why depend only on utilisation certificates? The Centre can rely on other indicators as well for fund utilisation. It can get direct user feedback. It can get electronic feedback from the workers themselves on workdays, wages, and work facilities.
What can prevent denial of work, especially to the most needy?
The ministry should set up a task force to go into areas that don’t seem to generate work and ensure work is done there. It is your democratic responsibility. You know the laggard mandals or panchayats and if you have a rapid action force for NREGA in each state they can go and address the problems in those areas and see that work is provided and wages are paid.
The government has suggested business correspondents and smart card-based solutions for wage payment. Will that help?
Smart cards and payment channels have teething problems and in Andhra Pradesh it is has delayed the process of wage payment. In fact, workers in larger villages preferred post offices rather than smart cards. For the last six months, the women managing the smart card system have not been paid. Another aspect is of the equipment replacement, spares and so on — attention to this was paid initially by the service delivery agencies but we see no commitment once they are in the business. Also they are exploiting gullible women.
The reforms have suggested measures to improve the quality of assets under NREGA. What do you think is the best way?
First, you need a specific provision for this in the MGNREGS budget. Civil engineer and bureaucrats must give way to experts. This calls for convergence with the agriculture department. Although located in the same building, the two ministries have not talked to each other. MGNREGS works plans are not integrated into district agriculture plans, lowering optimum benefit. Has any work of the NREGA been ever vetted by agricultural experts? Krishi Vikas Kendras are in districts but not involved in MGNREGS. MGNREGS must aim for the next genre of poverty-alleviation ideas and approaches rather than the old one. Key among them is equity and inclusion. Just including schedule castes or scheduled tribe is not enough for this. So creative ideas and next practices must be encouraged. For instance, they can get women in gram sabhas to take charge of all sanitation-related NREGA work.
What is the best way to devise a shelf of work for a region?
Where the employment offer is low, one key obstacle is that the shelf of work has originated from a backdrop of drought-relief work. It has little scope in areas with large irrigation or where water is the problem. So a new shelf of works that does not hinge on the ridge-to-valley earthworks or each gram sabha planning on its own (even though it is not implemented) need to be conceived. Until then employment offers of the scale required for MGNREGS will not be possible.
What can stop migration? Will these reforms help?
Certainty and confidence is crucial. These are absent now. Why not have penalties or incentives/disincentives on matters of confidence like dates, time period, work and so on? The issue of gaps between providing one employment and the other must be addressed.
Why is it that the average number of workdays has not gone above the 50-mark in NREGA even in Andhra Pradesh, which the ministry of rural development praises as a model?
Andhra has an average of providing a little over 50 days of the employment, despite a high level of commitment among AP rural development officials. Two years after implementing the Act, the employment offer in Andhra was about 40 days. When asked why this is so, the chief secretary said the capacity as available with the government can at best peak to delivering about 50 days. So, even as Andhra now has a large number of people employed on a temporary basis to serve the MGNREGS, after five years of experience and improvement, it can provide a maximum of 55 days of employment on the average. The problem there is that the mandals are overburdened and something needs to be done about it.
Why did AP fail to cross the 50-mark?
There are two reasons. The enormity of work overwhelms the officials at the mandal level. Besides, there is a fear psychosis. Officials shouldn’t be scared. Everyone now is under-measuring work since they are afraid of being accused of corruption. Field staff is getting sacked in Andhra after the social audits. A crime is different from an innocent mistake. If the money has gone to the worker one must be satisfied. One has to give a long rope when an official is trying to do something. Discriminate between paying someone who paid the worker a bit more and someone who has fudged wage records.
