You see those hills?” Jamshed Kanga, an illustrious IAS officer, then divisional commissioner, Pune, asked the noted development economist John Lewis who was visiting him in 1972, pointing to the barren Sahyadri range behind his office. “I will break every one of them if necessary, but will not let a single person starve.” It was the worst drought in the history of independent India, with a monsoon deficit of 25 per cent from the normal. Maharashtra and Gujarat suffered the most. Kanga was true to his word. Massive relief works, mostly of the nature he had indicated, warded off starvation.
That event four decades ago was the true progenitor of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS), now seven years old and the subject of a searching editorial in this paper (“What next for MNREGA?” February 4, 2013). Public works to provide relief have been around as long as droughts themselves, but the near-calamitous events of 1972 and heroic efforts of officers such as Kanga persuaded Maharashtra to enact its Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) soon thereafter.
The act assured employment at stipulated wage rates. It laid down rules regarding the wage and material components of the scheme expenditure and procedures to be followed. These are also essential features of the later NREG enactment.
The EGS experience was mixed; in drought-prone areas of eastern Maharashtra — Solapur, Beed, Osmanabad districts and adjoining areas — it evoked a positive response and helped alleviate the effects of periodic failures of monsoon. But in relatively well-irrigated areas of south-western Maharashtra, it drew little attention.
The state government, wiser for this experience, made substantial modifications. In 1988-89, Sharad Pawar, then chief minister, brought horticulture under EGS coverage. The expenditure composition was revised to permit a 40 per cent material component. That helped provide subsidies for planting material and some farm equipment. EGS then met with a more robust response, with spread and rejuvenation of orchards all over the state. In the 25 years since, Maharashtra has come to enjoy the position of the top horticulture state in the country.
A Planning Commission study found EGS to be popular and successful in providing relief as well as creating rural assets. It also recommended that maintenance of assets be made a part of EGS. The Tenth Five-Year Plan (2001-06) consolidated many employment programmes in rural areas into the Sampurna Gram Rojgar Yojana (SGRY).
NREGS was the United Progressive Alliance’s revised, improved version of SGRY (this remained in force even in the Eleventh Plan). It has been hailed as the first development programme instituted by an act of Parliament. The law specifies in detail the roles and responsibilities of decentralised bodies and officials. It provides fully worked-out procedures for everything; registrations, selection of activities, work supervision and measurement, payment, audits are all covered, as are penalties for not following the procedures. A registered family was entitled to 100 days of work a year at Rs 60 per day (since revised to the minimum wage of the area). Nine-tenths of the expenditure was to be on wages (since revised to 80 per cent).
By August 2008, NREGS was extended to cover all the districts, even though there had been little time to learn, leave alone absorb, the lessons of the first two years. The drought of 2009 became then the first major field test for NREG.
Rajasthan was among the worst sufferers. Through a vigorous and efficient implementation of various programmes, chiefly NREG, it avoided what could have been a catastrophe (full disclosure: I conducted an Eleventh Plan mid-term appraisal of the state’s poverty alleviation programmes at the request of its state planning board in 2010). Other states, less severely affected, fared somewhat less well on the implementation of NREG. Apart from the commitment of the state bureaucracy, a principal contributing factor to Rajasthan's effectiveness in using NREG was its long experience of managing drought relief activities. Mr C P Joshi, the central minister for rural development then, acknowledged in an interview in October 2010 that Rajasthan had a “history of dealing with drought.”
Problems with NREG started showing up increasingly since then. Even if we leave aside issues of leakages and corruption serious though they may be, days of employment per worker and overall expenditure have been declining, more or less across all states, in the last three years. The reason for the reduced demand surely cannot be a steep drop in poverty in this brief period.
The primary cause for this is the very design of the programme. Despite it being called an on-demand employment entitlement, it remains little more than a public works relief programme. A Maharashtra official remarked that even in districts such as Solapur which responded well to EGS, now there is very little to do: all tanks have been de-silted, contour bunds built, access roads constructed to such an extent that some villages now resemble Connaught Place with eight radial roads!
The very meticulously worded law now has become a strait-jacket. Senior state officials have been expressing their utter frustration at being unable to persuade the central authorities to allow them the least little latitude to incorporate variations to account for local realities even as they have distinguished themselves through their meticulous execution.
The other complicating factor is the impact of NREG on agricultural wages and labour availability. Mr Pawar has himself spoken about how adversely routine agricultural activities have been affected. Eastern states such as West Bengal and Bihar which have lately been doing rather well in agriculture would be among those affected. In these circumstances, Sonia Gandhi’s optimism that NREGS will lead to a second Green Revolution becomes baffling.
The basic problem of rural India is low incomes. To equate it with dearth of employment opportunities and therefore propose perpetual solutions of an essentially digging-and-filling-ditches nature is adding poverty of imagination to poverty of means. The pioneering state, Maharashtra, learnt its lessons more than two decades ago and started focussing on asset creation for providing higher incomes. In its quest for quick fixes, NAC has reduced that template back to permanent provision of dole.
A possible remedy lies in substitution of just one alphabet: the programme could become NRIGS — national rural income generation scheme. Would those who believe that NREGA was their talisman to electoral success make this leap of faith?
The writer taught at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and helped set up the Institute of Rural Management, Anand
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