| Recommendations |
The way ahead
Beginning April 1, 2008, the NREGA will become a pan-Indian programme: it will cover the entire country, extending the guarantee of 100 days of employment to around 45 million rural households. It will also be the only operational wage employment programme in the country, having subsumed all other public wage programmes (like the SGRY) within itself.
But the act is not merely a wage employment programme. As it is focused on the regeneration of village economy in the long term, the act’s success or failure will decisively impact the entire rural development scenario in India. We are already witnessing some of these impacts. The NREGA’s performance has been better than other similar programmes: a NREGA district creates 4.5 million person days of employment a year in comparison to 1.4 million by other districts.
Additionally, each district under NREGA is creating around 2,000-4,000 village assets every year – this is double the numbers created under EAS and the SGRY annually. The act has helped create around one million assets in the last two years, most of them water conservation works. These structures are expected to be working to their full potential in the coming monsoons. Among the 12 districts studied by this policy paper, the districts of Nagapattanam, Ranga Reddy and Siddhi stand out for their attempt at treating NREGA as a development programme.
On the flip side, the act has had its problems. An excessive focus on employment creation has begun to narrow down its objectives and potential. Besides, fears of corruption have led the act’s planners to make its implementation an extremely complex and cumbersome process. This, in turn, has forced panchayats to become more dependent on local bureaucracies – leading to results that have been quite the opposite than intended: more corruption!
As it awaits introduction across India, the NREGA, therefore, faces a formidable challenge: that of fulfilling its immense – and at times, proven – potential, without degenerating into another wage employment programme. It is a challenge that can be met; within its tenets and stipulations, the act holds the necessary wherewithal to do that. What is required are the political will and bureaucratic finesse to make it all work.1. Make village development, through productive assets creation, the primary objective.
It is clear that the NREGA’s success depends on its relevance to local development. If the programme succeeds in making an impact on the lives of local communities, people would naturally participate in it. In fact, an official failure in articulating the act’s development potential has led to dipping demand for employment under it.
Instead of implementing and evaluating the act purely in terms of employment creation, the focus should be on real impacts on local development through productive assets creation. Currently, the Union ministry of rural development evaluates the act on job creation and the number of assets created under preferred works category. The real effectiveness of the scheme can be measured by using three parameters:
1. Increase in average annual income of households
2. Increase in the productivity of small and marginal land holdings
3. Quality and contribution of assets like water tanks to overall water availability and groundwater recharge etc.
By changing the evaluation parameters as suggested, the scheme will assume the character of a rural development scheme, instead of a run-of-the-mill wage-earning programme. This will also help the government ensure that most of the works taken up remain within the preferred works category, that is, productive assets.
2. Make wage payment people- and development-friendly.Irregular payments, and paying less than the daily minimum wage, have turned out to be two great threats to the act’s development potential. The NREGA guarantees employment, not wages, so argue governments. Digging a tank, which requires more labour from a person, fetches less money – all because of the government’s archaic wage rates based on finished tasks.
On the other hand, building a road fetches more money, and requires less labour. Usually, a person working on a water harvesting structure gets less than 40 per cent of the wage he or she would have earned working on road construction. The result: roads and buildings are in. In many villages, panchayats are reluctantly approving road construction even though there are demands for or requirement of water harvesting structures.
States like Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat have rationalised their wage calculation methods to incentivise creation of productive assets. In Madhya Pradesh, the government has raised the wage money for digging a well to bring it at par with that for road construction. But most other states have not adapted such measures.
Wages in NREGA, therefore, must be standardised. The act has provisions which specify that people working under NREGA must be given the basic minimum daily wage, irrespective of the methods used to measure the works finished. These provisions need to be highlighted and made clearer in fresh guidelines.
3. Emphasise centrality of water conservation in NREGA.Despite the ‘non-negotiable’ nature of productive assets creation under the NREGA, most states have resorted to their own ways and means of spending the NREGA money – and barely any of it has gone into water conservation. In fact, only five states have made substantial allocation to water conservation. During 2006-07, Andhra Pradesh alone accounted for about 67 per cent of the total water conservation works under NREGA in the country. In the same period, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, Assam and Bihar devoted more money to road connectivity works than to water conservation.
This needs to change. Water conservation, the bulwark of rural development, must be made the mainstay of NREGA. Most of NREGA districts from the first cluster are in dryland areas and groundwater is a critical resource for agriculture. Thus the NREGA should focus on water conservation and recharge of groundwater. In fact, all the districts, which are marking good progress under the NREGA, have focused on water conservation.
The government needs to set a minimum number of water conservation works to be undertaken using the NREGA funds. Currently, the act lists the types of works to be undertaken, without any binding provisions on each type of work according to priority. At the same time, it does not restrict the state government in giving priority to any one of the works: this is the reason road construction is all the rage in some states.
4. Give importance to plantation for protecting catchments of water bodies
Plantation is a permissible work under NREGA. But very few Panchayats are taking up plantation in a large-scale. Plantation or afforestation is critical for protecting the catchments of the water structures created under NREGA. Also afforestation of degraded forest is beneficial for recharging groundwater. In many places Panchayats have not been able to take up plantation in the catchments of water bodies as that belong to forest departments. So plantation in forestlands must be allowed in NRGEA. Plantation under watershed development programmes and also the Joint Forest Management (JFM) must be included in NREGA.
Two years after they were begun, almost 80 per cent of the works under NREGA remain incomplete. As there is no provision in the NREGA to factor in completion of work in the overall planning, state governments have found an easy way out: they have initiated a large number of works, and abandoned them mid-way. In many states, structures built under the programme have simply been washed away by the monsoons.
The act does not have any mechanism either to ensure maintenance of the works. As a result, even the works that have been completed are wasting away due to lack of maintenance. Technically, if the works are on government lands, panchayats are responsible for their maintenance. But maintenance requires money, and panchayats are desperately short of funds that can help maintain such a large number of works.
It is, therefore, crucial that work completion be made inherent in the NREGA. To this effect, the government can introduce feasible time-frames for completing a work. On the other hand, maintenance of works must be brought under the NREGA’s purview, and panchayats provided special funds for maintenance based on the number of new works.
6. Focus on village level planning to make NREGA effective.Under the NREGA, panchayats are required to prepare prospective plans that involve extensive mapping of village resources. Besides this, panchayats are also supposed to make an annual plan every year to identify works that can be taken up for local resource improvement. So villages are the basic unit of planning under the act.
Even after two years of the act’s existence, this exercise has not received the attention it merits. Most NREGA districts have taken recourse to the interim provision of simply adopting the plans prepared under the NFFWP, thus bypassing panchayats and local communities. The National Food for Work Programme (NFFWP) plans were made without any local involvement, and did not reflect local needs. By adopting the same plans, the NREGA violates its own tenets and repeats the mistakes of the earlier wage programme. This interim provision must be done away with.
We also strongly believe that the government needs to facilitate village-level resource planning and designing to enable local residents to connect with the programme. Without such planning, the development impact of the NREGA will not be as expected because villages will not be able to channelise available resources to activities relevant to local needs.
7. Devolve funds and functionaries to panchayats for effective overall implementation.Under the NREGA, panchayats are supposed to play pivotal roles in designing, planning and executing at least 50 per cent of the total works. In reality, they have functioned merely as implementing agencies, with little say in the overall design or implementation process.
This is because of the stunted devolution process in India. Barring three, no state in the country has provided functions, functionaries and funds to panchayats for taking charge of development programmes. A panchayat assistant is supposed to be appointed along with technical staff for NREGA implementation, but such appointments have been made only in three states. Left to their own means, many panchayat members are hesitant to implement the NREGA, as it adds to their workload tremendously.
Clearly, this state of affairs cannot be allowed to persist. Panchayats must be given the required functionaries and funds for effective implementation. In line with the decision of the Union government to channelise all rural development programmes through panchayats, the Union ministry of panchayati raj has been signing agreements with the states to fast-track such devolution. This process must be speeded up and linked to the NREGA now.
