An ambitious idea, but is it working on the ground? A recent survey by student volunteers unearths serious irregularities
The National Food-For-Work Programme, precursor to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, is intended to provide work to the poorest of the poor, to enable them to earn enough to eat. An ambitious idea, but is it working on the ground? A recent survey by student volunteers unearths serious irregularities
Kunal Gautam, a Delhi School of Economics student, and Tarun Sharma and Harminder Singh, both students at Kriori Mal College, spent three weeks of their summer vacation checking out 10 different work sites located around Madhya Pradesh's Barwani village. As members of the Rozgar Adhikar Yatra, they were part of a team of students from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University who had been invited by Madhya Pradesh's food-for-work commissioner, N C Saxena (an appointee of the Supreme Court) to assess how the National Food-For-Work Programme (NFFWP) was being implemented on the ground. Currently, the NFFWP, launched in November 2004, operates in the country's 150 poorest districts in 10 states including Maharashtra , Gujarat , Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. It is intended to be an interim arrangement to be phased out once the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act comes into effect in these districts.
The student survey was carried out in six districts: Badwani (Madhya Pradesh), Dungarpur (Rajasthan), Palamau (Jharkhand), Purulia ( West Bengal ), Sonebhadra (Uttar Pradesh) and Surguja (Chhattisgarh). In each district, investigators surveyed 10 randomly selected work sites in a block. They also attempted to verify the muster rolls at one work site.
Never having visited a village in their lives, definitely not one deep in the country's interiors, the students were excited about their visit. They found the experience much more challenging than they had anticipated, as, chanting the NFFWP slogan ‘ Har hath ko kaam do, kaam ka poora daam do (work for every pair of hands, full payment for all work)', they had to trudge four hours along a rough village path to get to Badwani in MP. There is no motorable road to the village
When they began making inquiries about the NFFWP, however, they were horrified to learn that many construction sites existed only on paper. “There were no structures (on the ground) even though the local district authorities had received huge financial allocations,” said 18-year-old Gautam. “We demanded an explanation from the district magistrate V M Upadhayay. At first he refused to meet us but when we told him we would pursue the matter with Saxena, he changed his mind. He showed us the muster rolls, which had the signatures of the CEO of that particular block and B L Malviya, a gram panchayat member, which showed the money had been spent buying construction material and also towards payment of wages,” Harminder Singh added.
The villagers pointed out that most administrations and panchayat leaders maintained both ‘pucca' (final) and ‘kutcha' (rough) musters, and that if any villager questioned why money was being siphoned off in this manner he was immediately dismissed. Muster rolls are crucial documents that are supposed to contain detailed information on the number of days of work done, and payment made, to each labourer. NFFWP guidelines clearly stipulate that muster rolls must be made available for public scrutiny.
According to economist and right to food campaigner Jean Dreze, lack of transparency in maintaining muster rolls is one example of the failure of the government to enforce the guidelines of the NFFWP. Another failure, he points out, is its unwillingness to pay the minimum wage, which works out to almost Rs 59 per day. Labourers, he says, are routinely paid Rs 25 a day -- less than half the minimum wage. The investigators were unable to come up with a single work site where the legal minimum wage was being paid. At some sites, in Badwani, labourers were being warned that if they asked for minimum wages they would be dismissed. In Purulia, a woman who had worked for three days with her son and daughter earned only 13 kg of rice.
Pravin Kumar, a student from Ramjas College and also part of the Rozgar Adhikar Yatra, visited Mangari village in Chhattisgarh. “All they had to show for building activity was two walls and one drain on which, the authorities claimed, Rs 5 lakh had been spent. It was obvious that major fudging was going on,” said Kumar.
As part of his survey, Kumar also visited three villages in Surguja district where local panchayat members claimed most of the work was complete. “Here again, the panchayat's claims turned out to be completely dubious,” said the scandalised student. When asked to furnish a copy of the muster rolls, the authorities refused to do so. The investigators had to storm the district headquarters of the irrigation department to lay their hands on the rolls. A public verification of the documents uncovered massive discrepancies. Workers who had toiled for three days were shown to have done 60 days of work, while there were many others who had been paid in foodgrain and had not received a paisa even though they were shown to have received wages for four and five months.
This appears to be the experience of most of the students who fanned out all over the country checking the success of the programme. Sandeep Rai, who went to villages in Palamau district, discovered a number of irregularities. The most horrifying was when he found good quality rice, purchased by the Food Corporation of India , being siphoned off by middlemen, while the villagers had to make do with inferior quality rice. Here too the muster rolls were fudged. Some had the names of labourers on the left, their signatures (or thumbprints) on the right, and the middle column, where the details were supposed to be, blank – presumably to be filled in later by officials.
In Sonebhadra district, again, there were two sets of muster rolls: a ‘kutcha' one scribbled into a cheap notebook and kept at the work site, and a ‘pucca' one on the prescribed forms and hidden from public scrutiny. Actual wage payments based on the number of days of work done by each labourer would be listed in the ‘kutcha' rolls, while the ‘pucca' rolls, the manufactured ones, were used for official purposes and bore no relation to the actual rolls. Financial allocations, however, are based on ‘pucca' muster rolls.
Madhuri, an activist with the Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan from Barwani, insists that the entire agricultural sector is facing a severe crisis, which is being reflected in the number of farmer suicides in this backward region. There is also large-scale displacement of tribals whose livelihoods have been completely destroyed. Many tribals do not get even two or three days of employment a year. The situation is so grim in fact that tribals, who constitute only 7% of the population, now comprise 40% of those displaced. They are willing to work for as little as Rs 10 a day. But the workers have no bargaining power; activists say all the money being doled out by the government goes towards supporting corruption. “It was to highlight the plight of the poor that this 52-day bus yatra was undertaken,” says activist Aruna Roy.
The only state where the food-for-work programme is functioning effectively is Rajasthan. Here, activists point out, muster rolls are authentic, contractors have been kept out, and wages remain close to the legal minimum. Proof enough that the programme can be made to work if the proper safeguards are put in place and enforced.
Former prime minister V P Singh, who has been closely associated with the NFFWP, believes the rampant corruption can be checked only if the Right to Information Act is implemented in all states. “The government must show commitment in implementing this programme,” he says.
The National Advisory Council has suggested that the Employment Guarantee bill be restricted to households with below-the-poverty-line (BPL) cards, and offer employment for 100 days in a year. But activists demand that the programme be translated into a full-fledged Employment Guarantee Act, which will be irreversible and unrestricted in the number of days of work it offers. Also, women in the programme must be offered equal wages.
V P Singh points out that one of the major problems facing the scheme is identifying people who are on the BPL lists. “Anyone who is going to pick up a spade and do this kind of work is poor and should be brought into its ambit,” he says.
InfoChange News & Features, July 2005