Arihant
Pawariya
- Aug 22,
2017
In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood in parliament and termed Mahatma
Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) - the flagship
United Progressive Alliance (UPA) scheme - “as a proof of your failings.”
“I will ensure MGNREGA is never discontinued. After so many years of
being in power, all you were able to deliver is for a poor man to dig ditches a
few days a month,” he added. It was poor logic wrapped in bluster. Though the
statement was meant as a mockery of the Congress for designing a poor scheme,
it revealed instead the helplessness of the Prime Minister in repealing it.
Last year, on the 10-year anniversary of NREGA, his government hailed its
achievements of the past decade as “a cause of national pride and
celebration".
It left many supporters of the Prime Minister and his party puzzled and
disappointed. In this year’s budget, the government allocated Rs 48,000 crore -
the highest ever amount in a single year to this scheme. It obviously looks
like a u-turn on a major policy position by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the
Prime Minister, which many supported because of his pragmatic views on
socialist cash-sucking blackhole schemes like NREGA.
But the current National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has made
some major tweaks in the way NREGA is operated. Thus, the current version of
the programme and that of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) are based on
totally different approaches. The former is aimed at asset creation and takes a
target-driven approach. The latter operated on a demand-driven method where the
focus was on job creation.
Centre For Social Development Director Ashok Pankaj, writing in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) journal, explains that the UPA prioritised jobs over asset creation
by mandating wage-material expenditure ratio of 60:40 in schedule-1 of the act.
The same schedule also mandated that four out of the eight works that the
scheme covered were related to Kachcha work which needed more
labour. The remaining four works which were related to asset creation were also
labour intensive.
The NDA government added a proviso to schedule-1 stating that, “at least
60 per cent of the works to be taken up in a District in terms of cost, shall
be for the creation of productive assets directly linked to agriculture and
allied activities through development of land, water and trees.”
Pankaj accepts that the central premise of UPA’s NREGA - decentralised
demand-driven job creation - failed to take off because job creation remained
supply-driven. The other reasons he lists, include the failure of implementing
agencies in strictly complying with the act or their problems such as manpower
shortage, ineffectiveness of grievance-redressal mechanism and social audit.
The number of works under the scheme has gone up from eight to 23.
Pankaj believes that targeted assets creation might increase centralisation of
implementation which can be problematic because given the differences in local
needs, it would be better and more useful if the decision to select works is
taken at the gram sabha level.
If a top-down-approach is applied, as was the case in the 2016-17
budget, where the central government set a target of constructing 882,325 farm
ponds and dug wells, 1,039,344 vermi compost pits, 3,299,344 individual
household latrines, 63,531 anganwadi buildings, then it becomes a problem. But
is this worry justified? The act already states that 50 per cent of the total
works (in terms of cost) shall be implemented by gram panchayats that will
select, plan and execute the work.
Another important change that the NDA government has ushered in is the
addition of “individual assets” and infrastructure for the “National Rural
Livelihoods Mission (NRLM)-compliant Self-Help Groups” in the assets list. This
is significant given the potential positive effect it can have on the
beneficiaries.
As Pankaj states, “providing one dug well to a family in the black soil
Deccan area where cotton cultivation is popular has potentialities to change
the status of the family from a casual labour household to that of a
cultivator.” Those who could not afford to spend any capital on doing this from
their own pockets, can now do so with the addition of “individual assets” under
the scheme.
There are some concerns that it is only the agriculturalists who will
benefit from this as the landless labourers who constitute majority of the
NREGA workforce will lose out as they do not have any assets to develop in the
first place. Some justify this step saying that given that the landowning farmers
were the biggest losers from the NREGA scheme, it is only apt that they get
compensated in some form. Additionally, we will know the real impact only after
studying the creation of “individual assets” and its beneficiaries over a
period of time.
Pankaj explains further that the NDA has made convergence the central
motif of the scheme. Through macro-convergence, it has mandated that 60 per
cent of the assets created (in terms of cost) shall be related to agriculture
and allied activities. To ensure there is no duplication of works, and to
encourage integrated planning, the government has tried to converge spending on
NREGA and other schemes like Pradhan Mantri Gramin Awas Yojana or constructing
anganwadis and so on.
One of the major problems with NREGA under the UPA, especially after
2011 when its implementation began slipping into paralysis, was that government
bombarded implementing agencies with thousands of circulars averaging over
hundred a year. Pankaj tells us that the NDA is in the process of consolidating
over 1,039 circulars along with guidelines as a master circular-cum-programme
guidelines. It is also clearing up pending works on a priority basis and have
set deadlines for the same.
UPA’s act was far from perfect. In fact one wouldn’t be wrong to say
that the primary aim of launching this scheme was to win a second term rather
than create jobs. The UPA hastily extended the scheme to the whole of India
when the initial plan was to do so over a five-year period. As so happens with
all planning-related schemes, the government set up many objectives for this
scheme, apart from creating jobs such as “strengthening democratic
decentralisation through greater participation of people at local levels in the
planning, reduction in distress migration, high participation of women and
their empowerment” and so on.
The NDA has made some good improvements over the UPA’s version of the
act but it may not suffice. An expenditure of Rs 50,000 crore is a significant
amount which can be constructively spent on building tomorrow’s infrastructure,
financing education for millions of poor students or providing healthcare
facilities to poor people in remote villages. Whether it is a target-driven or
a demand-driven approach, asset oriented or job oriented, there are better and
financially prudent ways of achieving these objectives. Doling out money in
such an ineffective way is not the way to go.
Currently, the NDA is short of numbers in the upper house and no big
changes can be expected before the next general elections. One hopes that as
soon as the magic number is touched, some substantiative reforms will be initiated.
Shift in MGNREGS from UPA to NDA
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