Open Forum

New Delhi, 26 September 2008

NREG Scheme Affect

SOCIAL AUDIT MOST CRUCIAL

By T.D. Jagadesan

The critics notwithstanding, the two-year-old National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has widely been acknowledged as a pioneering legislation. However, it is seen essentially as a wage employment programme. The NREGA is indeed the first tangible commitment to the poor that they can expect to earn a living wage without loss of dignity, and demand this as a right.

It so happens that the guarantee of 100 days of employment is possibly the most important feature of the Act. Never before has there been an initiative of this nature and magnitude in development history. Direct benefits from wages have been of enormous importance to poor households.

However, the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) scheme is much more, and its potential is truly phenomenal. The unique character of the NREGA lies in the remarkable opportunities it opens to transform the development scenario in the country. This is beginning to be revealed in the two years that it has been in operation. The irony is that this is yet to be recognized or understood even in Government. Will the promise then, be fulfilled?

Perhaps for the first time in a government programme, transparency and accountability was seen to be possible as a participatory process. This is the direct outcome of social audits, the conduct of which has been mandated not only in the Right to Information (RTI) Act, but also in the NREGA itself. Such social audits have thrown up incredible instances where corrupt officials in village after village have returned the money which they misappropriated.

Further, partnerships between the administration and the community have worked and were found to have been feasible. Officials, NGOs, village groups and wage labourers have got together in several States to ensure the effective implementation of the programme – a big change from the feudal and mai baap syndrome which continued to persist after the British left. This brings us closer to the objective of decentralized governance.

An encouraging development also is that it has actually been possible to locate, and associate “partners” in most, or at any rate, in many districts. In fact, several groups, NGOs and activists have found in the NREGA a vehicle for meaningful interventions – to facilitate the coming together of the rural poor to organize themselves for wage employment. This has enhanced the capacities of community organizations and NGOs to work with government in development schemes.

A particular significance of the NREG scheme is that many of the assets created under the programme can directly benefit the poor. This is because the Act specifies that individual works are permitted, but only for the benefit of households below the poverty line and from the scheduled caste and tribe communities. Just as the horticulture revolution under the Employment Guarantee Scheme of Maharashtra benefited the better off farmers in the 1990s, so also the NREG scheme can make possible a productivity revolution on the lands of the poor.

Perhaps the most important of all, and of lasting impact, is that a process for the empowerment of the poor is emerging around the NREGA. This process has commenced in several parts of the country where poor households have been able to assert themselves and demand the payment of the minimum wage, bargain for higher wages, seek and obtain the unemployment allowance from a reluctant and unwilling administration.

Clearly, the employment guarantee has initiated changes which are qualitatively different from any of the past; these could define a new paradigm in development. They have of course, not been widespread, and the impact also has been varied and uneven. However, this is just the second year and even so a difference is being made. The challenge now is how best to proceed to achieve the promise of the NREGA.

The social audit has emerged as perhaps the most powerful instrument for transparency and accountability in government programmes; it needs to be conducted everywhere. Regrettably, recently the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia was reported to have said that the NREG scheme has failed in virtually half the country and that it has not delivered jobs to those who need them the most.

According to statistics available with the Commission the scheme has failed miserably in Orissa, Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and even Modi’s Gujarat — States that account for roughly 250 Lok Sabha seats. The reason: fudging of the numbers of beneficiaries. However, the report cards were relatively better in BJP-ruled States such as Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

So far only one State, Andhra Pradesh, has been pro-active and has taken the social audit initiative to mobilize the State machinery. Specifically, the administration has been made responsible to obtain the records of the scheme.

A similar path should be followed by all States; otherwise, as has happened in Rajasthan and elsewhere, the social audit process will be resisted and could even be neutralized. There was resistance, initially in Andhra Pradesh as well, because, on several occasions, the administration itself was exposed. However, since the initiative had come from Government, there was no confrontation or obstruction by the officials.

Andhra Pradesh, however, has been an exception, and no State seems willing to act on the social audit provision. It is perhaps not realistic to expect other States to issue similar instructions, and a directive from the Union Government will be necessary. Further, the release of funds could be linked with the performance of States in the conduct of social audit. Such conditions for release are not uncommon. Simple and effective.. ---INFA

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