MGREGA – A Stock Taking

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or NREGA is the mamoth job guarantee scheme which came into existence in 2005. The central government outlay for the scheme is Rs. 39,100 crores 2009-10.The scheme provides for a legal guarantee for one hundred days of employment in every financial year to adult members of any rural household willing to do public work-related unskilled manual work at the statutory minimum wage of Rs.100 per day.



The act was indented to improve the purchasing power of the rural people, primarily semi or un-skilled work to people living in rural India, whether or not they are below the poverty line. Surprisingly, this programme was named after Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act on 2nd October, 2009 AND NOT AFTER INDIRA GANDHI OR RAJIV GANDHI!!!

It has been into existence for the past three years and has been expanded to various regions of India. It is this programme which is said to have helped the congress led coalition to retain power.

SOME CONCRENS

In recent months there have been massive delays in wage payments around the country, causing immense hardship to NREGS workers. Underlying this state of affairs is the breakdown of grievance redress systems. All the grievance redress provisions of the NREGA have been sidelined, including, for instance, the provisions for unemployment allowance, for penalties on errant officials, for compensation in the event of delayed wage payments or for framing of Grievance Redress Rules. The Central and State governments don’t seem to be interested in making themselves
accountable to the people.



There is a wide spread instance of exploitation of the workers especially the ones who are not literate. There have been numourous instance of “hoarding” of job cards by sarpanchs, panchayat secretaries. This shows a clear evidence of fudging of records and siphoning off NREGS funds.

NO CONSTRUCTIVE INFRASTRUCTURE

The NREGS has faced criticism that the kind of infrastructure it is building contributes nothing to the overall development of the country. It has been reduced to only have populist character without being truly constructive.
It is true that the technical standards of NREGS works are often quite low. Most of them are not productive. The attempt upto the wage payment stage itself takes so much effort that audit of the quality of work become very difficult and the politicians are least bothered about the infrastructure.

REVIVAL OF THE AGRARIAN ECONOMY



At most NREGA if implemented well can be used to provide a good form of social security in rural areas. The NREGS can also help revive the rural economy, by creating productive assets, generating purchasing power, strengthening institutions of local governance and promoting new standards of transparency.
NREGA is not a tool to implement solution or an alternative to the lack of public investment in rural/Agrarian infrastructure.

BENEFIT TO MARGINALISED COMMUNITIES

It’s the marginalized communities are the primary beneficiaries of the NREGS. Most of to benefit are the landless farmers belonging to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe families. Similarly, the proportion of women among NREGS workers is close to 50 per cent, and rising year after year.
In this post I have mostly tried to analyze the negative aspects of NREGA’s implementation. In upcoming post, I would try to write to write about the various benefits of scheme and improvements that can done to ensure better productivity of the funds that is spent on it.