It’s not just city folks who have realised that street power alone will make the ruling class do its job well. In the last two years, in the villages of Karnataka, the people are coming forward to form unions as workers of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). And it is yielding them rich dividends — not just in the form of prompt payments, and 100 and more days of work (given that 2012 was a drought year and 150 days were granted), but also in many other ways.
In a couple of villages in which the people were members of the MGNREGS union affiliated to the Kooli Karmikara Sanghatana, or the daily wage workers union, registered at the state level, it was keenly felt that 40 families who lived in huts, in complete shambles, deserved to get proper houses from the state. Although housing assistance was being granted to every village annually, these 40 families never made it.
So, the moment the union took it up, 20 houses were immediately sanctioned under the Indira Awas Yojana, says Abhay Kumar, the head of the Kooli Karmikara Sanghatana.
Again, in a certain village, the ration shop was not functioning. It did not open for months, and the people did not know how to fix the problem, till they decided to take it up with the union. The very day – after the union took it up – the public distribution system shop opened and carried on its work, as if it had never been closed before. The Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state has been on a liquor-shop-sanctioning spree in the countryside, and that has been worrying people, especially with the youth taking to drinking. So, the union took up the matter with the state, and for now, there is a lull in issuing licences for liquor vends.
While there are 10 million families in the state, 25,000 families are now members of the Sanghatana, and are present in nine districts.
The state of MGNREGS is also quite robust in some of these districts, thanks to the workers’ union.
For example, in Raichur district, where the total MGNREGS expenditure this financial year has been Rs 150 crore, the workers’ union was responsible for Rs 20 crore worth of work.
In Raichur and seven other districts where the union is strong, members have completed 100 days of work and are waiting for the next 50 days, says Kumar.
The method in which the union expands is based on demand. When eight or nine villages express a wish to be part of the union, the Sanghatana visits the village and identifies a villager in the area who is interested in working as a permanent facilitator. The Sanghatana then trains the facilitator till heshe is ready to work in the interest of villagers, voicing their demand for work, their demand for payments, and so on. He tells the villagers how to get work and helps them and backs them when they demand work.
Each family pays Rs 100 a year as membership fee. This fee is used to pay a monthly salary to the facilitator.
The Sanghatana has been spreading fast, but growth is slower for similar unions in other states.
In Madhya Pradesh, Bengal and Jharkhand, such unions exist, but most have not been registered. In Rajasthan, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatana’s (MKSS’) struggle to get its MGNREGS union registered met with failure in the labour court recently, a year after the state government had rejected it. “Now, we will move the high court,” said Shankar Singh of MKSS.
If Karnataka’s spirit catches on, there is hope that the people elsewhere, too, would be able to claim for themselves the money spent on education, health care, nutrition, among others.
