NREGA: Generating scams, not growth

LUCKNOW: In Rae Bareli's Kahua village, not far from where Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi harped on UPA-II's rural employment guarantee scheme in November last year, there's a barely-legible, rust-eaten board bearing details of the last brick road constructed there. Residents of the village say it was laid in 2010, before Anees Ansari, the last gram pradhan was shot dead.Since then, no new road has been constructed in the village.
According to the rural development ministry's NREGA asset register, though, another brick road was built in Kahua in 2012, at an estimated cost of Rs 1.5 lakh. Not a single person received the job that was guaranteed to them, but more than Rs 1.3 lakh were spent on buying the material required for brick laying. The authorities involved, though, have been unable to explain how a road was built without generating employment for a single individual.
Kahua, though, is symptomatic of the larger problem the Congress faces. The rural employment guarantee scheme continues to be party's flagship welfare scheme intended to benefit crores of rural poor across India. In Uttar Pradesh, the scheme has been riddled with irregularities from its inception. More than seven years after the scheme was first implemented in the state, the results are less than satisfactory.
There are allegedly financial irregularities of more than Rs 6,000 crore that punch holes in the Centre's success story. Between 2007-10, several crores were misspent in seven UP districts in countless fraudulent works. The Centre pressed for a CBI inquiry in these districts and after a bitterly fought battle with the state, won. Chief minister Akhilesh Yadav's secretary, Pandhari Yadav, was under the scanner for irregularities in the implementation of NREGS and was shunted out as a result. Among other major anomalies, funds meant for payment of salaries to contractual employees were used, instead, for alleged awareness campaigns and to buy plants and stationary. The Centre blamed the state, but didn't initiate action. It threatened UP with stopping the release of funds, but never followed up with action.
And the irregularities continued, unabated. Data released by the ministry this month suggests that despite the pat on the back by Centre and state, NREGS is wanting on several parameters, including its attempt to give employment to all job seekers. Participation of women is abysmally low as well - less than the mandated 33%. Wages, which should be paid by the state government to labourers after measuring the work completed, too, are still doled out at a flat rate. Worse, UP does not have in place a state quality monitor, to ensure works done follow certain standards; after seven years, the grievance redressal mechanisam has still not reached every district of the state.
The major flaw, NREGS activists say, is that though the Central government has steadily given out doles to the state government, it has failed to monitor expenditure. "The basic purpose of the Act, to guarantee employment to all those who demand work, has been defeated. If you take the instance of the northern states of Madhya Pradesh, UP and Bihar, they collectively account for over 75% of the total liabilities accrued under the Act. Payment of wages from the previous fiscals in these states is also pending," an activist said.
In UP, the average number of days for which people have been given employment has never exceeded 40 days in the past seven years since the Act was implemented. Though it is mandatory to pay the wages within a maximum period of 14 days, more than Rs 100 crore is pending towards payment of wages in UP.
In the past five years, the Centre has spent more than Rs 1.5 lakh crore on implementing NREGS in UP. There continue to be, however, several instances where job cards were distributed but no employment given. In UP, only 15,000 out of 52,000 gram panchayats have village secretaries. "The major area in which the scheme needs improvement is in the planning of works. According to the Act, works should be planned by gram sabhas in open meetings. That practice is nearly non-existent and the gram pradhans take arbitrary and biased decisions," says AK Singh, former director, Giri Institute of Development Studies.
Singh, however, says that scams notwithstanding, NREGS has had far-reaching implications. "The scheme has resulted in a 17-20% increase in total household incomes of labourers. Even more importantly, NREGS has resulted in a general increase in wage rates; from Rs 50, wage rates have more than doubled because of the job guarantee scheme," he said.