Sunita Narain: Fixing the employment Bill

DOWN TO EARTH

Till it gets away from digging and filling holes, the programme will be of little help

Corruption, we know, takes myriad forms in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the country's main opposition party, believes that it is epitomised in Railway Minister Lalu Prasad, and wants his head.

The fallout: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill has been delayed. It awaits clearance of a parliamentary standing committee headed by a BJP member who along with his party associates has decided not to go to work. Corruption, as I said, comes in many forms.

The employment bill was introduced in the Parliament in December 2004, after much bickering over the money to be spent on providing rights of employment to millions of poor in the country.

The government maintains that restricting this guarantee to the poorest 150 districts would cost the exchequer Rs 9,000 crore annually. The bill's critics rile this as expenditure that will lead to nothing.

That is only one possibility. The other possibility is that the bill could actually change the economic future of millions of Indians. But to do this, we will have to focus not on the quantum of money, but on what is spent and how it is spent.

But even the votaries of the bill see it primarily as welfare: doling out work to the poor in return for which they get money and can buy food to tide over another drought. But this bill can be the answer to drought and economic destitution: it can provide not just drought relief, but relief against drought.

To make jobs work for development we must focus on much more than the mechanics of spending money. We must understand that the biggest employment opportunity in the country exists in creating and maintaining rural assets: trees, grazing lands, water-harvesting structures, roads and other infrastructure.

The question we need to ask is why do these assets that get built in one season get lost in another? What can we do to ensure that the labour invested in rural regeneration leads to durable and productive assets? That is the challenge of the new generation of employment programme.

Currently, the programme is designed for unproductive employment generation: digging holes to fill them with earth and then digging them again. The road constructed one year, using the labour of the poor, will be washed away the next season.

The check-dam built one year will be gone by the next. The sapling, planted one year, will wither away the next. It is precisely this hole that must be plugged. But for this, the employment programme has to become the basis of village-level developmental activity. The labour of the poor should be used to build their natural capital.

But asset building is not merely about jobs. Assets require clarity of ownership and stake in management. Currently, the programme is designed to create employment for building public (actually governmental) assets: roads, schools and ponds. The problem is that these governmental assets are nobody's assets. Moreover, government agencies at the village level are fractured and so, implementation of their programmes gets distorted as well.

Take water structures. A pond requires a catchment. But even as the employment programme uses labour to dig the pond, its catchment is controlled by government departments, say, the forest department or the revenue department.

The pond probably belongs to the panchayat (if it is small) or the irrigation department (if it is large). Anyhow, the pond remains, what it is not meant to be, a hole in the ground: it has no water and can't recharge groundwater "" a typical example of unproductive employment.

The question to ask is who can best create these durable assets? Fractured bureaucracies will provide fractured answers. The answer is to find the owners of the asset and provide them legal rights to manage these resources. To do this we will need to integrate employment generation with decentralisation and put jobs into the domain of the panchayats.

We will also need the different land and water bureaucracies of the state to function as line agencies of the panchayat so that the assets created are planned, owned and operated by communities and not faceless agencies.

With innovation in systems of governance "" strengthening the accountability of panchayats through gram sabhas (village assemblies), putting the transfer of money in public domain "" the money can actually reach those it's meant for. And then, it can be made to work.

The bill is critical. Not only because it will provide employment. But because, if it is operationalised correctly, it could root out the very corruption that BJP is apparently so agitated about.

Let's be clear that in the hierarchy of corruption, high-level corruption, however despicable, is less destructive than the low-level corruption, which pervades the daily lives of Indians and makes delivery of governmental programmes a complete farce.

The answer to this malaise "" made famous by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's statement, that only 15 paise of each rupee spent reaches the poor "" is to have transparent and accountable systems. It is time we counted real change.