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National Rural Employment Guarantee Act – the only successful
flagship programme of the UPA government – is under
attack. In the past month, the media has been full of
reports of how the scheme has provided jobs to only
3 per cent of those eligible, how it has led to colossal
waste and diversion of funds, that it is a corrupt and
inefficient exercise of a doddering government.
Criticism
of the NREGA is not new: even when the law was being
formulated, there was protest among those who felt that
the money would be dissipated in local-level corruption
and amount to a huge wastage of public resources. Hugely
inflated projections of the likely cost were presented
without any attempt at statistical backing, and it was
argued that the country simply could not afford such
an expensive and wasteful programme.
The
most recent media frenzy has centred on a recent CAG
draft report (Performance Audit of Implementation of
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, Office
of the Principal Director of Audit, Economic and Service
Ministries, New Delhi, December 2006). The negative
findings of this report have been widely publicised
in the mainstream media, and misrepresented to argue
that there are massive leakages and widespread corruption,
that the benefits are not reaching the intended beneficiaries
and useful assets are not being created. Some columnists
have even argued that the entire programme should simply
be wound up, to be replaced by a strategy of "giving
skills" to the population.
The
CAG Report actually says something quite different.
In fact, the report is not about corruption – the word
does not appear even once in the entire document – and
only tangentially about specific instances of diversion
or misutilisation of funds. True, it does note that
the promise of 100 days of employment per household
has not been met, but that is well known even from the
official figures which show an all-India average of
33 days of work provided to 25.5 million households.
The
main focus of the report is on the lack of the administrative
capacity to run this scheme in the desired decentralised
manner and the need to build this capacity quickly and
effectively. This is plainly evident from the main conclusion:
"The main deficiency was the lack of adequate administrative
and technical manpower at the Block and GP levels, especially
the Programme Officer, Technical Assistants, and Employment
Guarantee Assistants. The lack of manpower adversely
affected the preparation of plans, scrutiny, approval,
monitoring and measurement of works, and maintenance
of the stipulated records at the block and GP level.
Besides affecting the implementation of the scheme and
the provision of employment, this also impacted adversely
on transparency, and made it difficult to verify the
provision of the legal guarantee of 100 days of employment
on demand."
In
other words, the CAG Report has pointed out that the
programme so far has not done what it was supposed to
do to the full extent, mainly because of the shortage
of administrative and technical staff. What it stresses
therefore is the urgent need to ensure more administrative
assistance for the programme at all levels, which really
means both resources and personnel devoted to the actual
implementation, monitoring and financial management
of the programme.
This
is a very useful and welcome suggestion, and one which
the central and state governments need to take very
seriously. The Report does not by any means suggest
that the programme should be reduced or wound up. Instead,
it refers to the need to ensure the administrative and
technical capacity for the expansion of the programme
to all districts of the country.
It
is increasingly recognised that the NREGA has the potential
not only to generate more employment directly and indirectly,
but also to transform rural economic and social relations
at many levels. The huge potential of the NREGA has
already been evident particularly in the enthusiastic
response of local people, landless and marginal farmers
and women workers in particular, wherever information
about the programme has been properly disseminated.
But
there is also no doubt that this enormous potential
is still incipient and requires to be substantially
supported in many different ways. This is because the
way that the NREGA has been framed, and the desired
mode of implementation, amount to no less than asking
for a social and political revolution. The programme
reverses the way the Indian state has traditionally
dealt with the citizenry, and envisages a complete change
in the manner of interaction of the state, the local
power elites and the local working classes in rural
India. The NREGA is completely different in conception
from earlier government employment schemes since it
treats employment as a right and the programme is intended
to be demand-driven. Furthermore, the Act and Guidelines
anticipate very substantial participation of the local
people in the planning and monitoring of the specific
schemes, to a degree which has not been at all common.
The
very notion of employment as a right of citizens (even
if it is limited to 100 days per household in the Act);
of the obligation of the government to meet the demand
for work within a specified time period, and to have
developed a shelf of public works that can be drawn
upon to meet this demand; of the panchayat participation
in planning and monitoring; and the provision for social
audit, are all very new concepts.
For
this to work, it requires, at the minimum, two things:
the ability and willingness of local government and
panchayats to plan works and run the programme effectively;
and the dissemination about the programme and its guidelines
to local people who can make use of it to register,
demand work and run social audits.
Obviously,
all this will take time to permeate down to the local
levels. So to start with, an uneven record of implementation
as well as the presence of a large number of problems
that require correction are only to be expected. There
are bound to be difficulties and time lags in making
local officials and others responsive to this very different
approach. And of course, it necessarily challenges the
prevailing power structures, in some cases quite substantially.
Therefore attempts to oppose or subvert the correct
and full implementation of the scheme in rural areas
are only to be expected.
But
the hostility in the national media is intriguing, since
in the last financial year, the programme cost only
around Rs. 8,000 crore, or about 1.5 per cent of total
central government spending . As it happens, the apparent
misuse of much larger amounts of public funds rarely
gets much mention in the press, especially when it pertains
to expenditure that is likely to benefit the urban elite,
such as major new highways or new airports. But on the
relatively small amount of money spent on NREGA there
have been shrill and adverse allegations in the media
from the very start.
Almost
all the media coverage tends to be adverse. This is
even though the experience of the NREGA and the degree
to which it has been effective vary dramatically across
the country, depending upon the extent of social and
political mobilisation, the power and capacity of local
panchayats, the degree of motivation and enthusiasm
among officials of state and local governments, and
other factors.
Even
with these variations, the overall story is still positive.
Many households have not been covered, but many have.
100 days of work have not yet been provided, but an
average of 33 days has, which is clearly a step forward.
And this will obviously increase over time.
There
are also some clear successes, in certain states and
districts. It is already evident from field reports
that there has been some improvement in consumption
of the poor, reduction of distress migration and slight
increases in lean season wage rates (especially for
women) in the areas where the programme has functioned
successfully.
Obviously,
these successes have to be sustained, replicated and
expanded. And in other areas the weaknesses of the programme
that have been identified by the CAG and other observers
have to be addressed, including through local mobilisation.
But this cannot happen overnight, it is necessarily
a long process. The important thing is to create a momentum
whereby the programme will actually work as intended
across the country.
Maybe
this is actually what the critics of the NREGA fear:
that, far from being an expensive failure, it will prove
to be an extremely cost-effective way of increasing
employment directly and indirectly, reviving the rural
economy, providing basic consumption stability to poor
households and improving the bargaining power of rural
workers. If it does all that, it would point to the
potential success of active government intervention
to generate output and employment, which is seen as
impossible by some of these critics. Maybe that is why
so much of the corporate-controlled media seem to be
actively engaged in trashing it.
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