On the one hand, there is a proposal to expand the scheme to the Naxal-hit areas by giving it a facelift and on the other hand, there is an effort to weaken it from within as is sought to be done by a section of sarpanches in Rajasthan. The sarpanches wanted to get rid of social audit provision in NREGA.

Members of the Central Employment Guarantee Council (CEGC) were anxious to improve the scope of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA), at their meeting held in New Delhi on August 28, 2010. One of their suggestions was that in the Naxal-hit regions, jobs under NREGA should be guaranteed round the year.

CEGC had set up six working groups for improving the scope of NREGA. One of the groups also suggested that in the drought-prone areas and regions affected by national calamity, NREGA should provide 50 additional days work to all those who demand work.

The CEGC considered the plight of people belonging to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, who invariably suffer most from poverty. The group is supposed to have recommended that in their case, the guaranteed number of working days should be increased from 100 to 120 or 125 days.

According to reports, CEGC members Aruna Rao and Jean Dreze demanded that wages of NREGA workers should be linked with Consumer Price Index. Several members were opposed to social audit being done in the village by the sarpanch when he himself is part of the system, which meant that social audit should be entrusted to an independent agency.

The Rural Development Minister C.P. Joshi was reported to have agreed that social audit done by sarpanches would not yield fair result. CEGC members desired that the Rural Development Department should take a decision on the various CEGC recommendations at the earliest but the Minister expressed the view that since most of the decisions regarding money matters had been taken by the Parliament, legal implications of the CEGC recommendations will have to be studied before any decision could be taken. According to reports, the Planning Commission member Mihir Shah favoured fixing a timeframe in which the recommendations would be implemented.

If the recommendations adopted and various other observations made at the CEGC meeting pointed to favourable factors for NREGA, what happened three days later, on September 1, in Jaipur was most shocking, to say the least; Rajasthan sarpanches were agitating against social audit prescribed in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) and had clashed with the police. Sarpanches in the State had been agitating against social audit for weeks and had come to Jaipur to submit a memorandum, on problems faced by them in implementation of the job scheme, to Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot.

No delegation turned up to meet the Chief Minister who was reported to have waited for them for two hours. There seemed to have developed some differences among them (sarpanches) regarding their plan of action, Gehlot had said.

Just as the UPA Government considers NREGA as a flagship scheme of the Bharat Nirman Programme, Rajasthan has come to be regarded as the flagship state in the matter of implementation of the NREGA. The sarpanches' agitation against social audit in Rajasthan itself speaks of how effective has been the movement for social audit at the panchayat level in the state.

A member of the National Advisory Council, headed by Sonia Gandhi, and one of the pioneers of NREGA, Aruna Roy has asked the Rajasthan Government not to succumb “to the pressure of sarpanches” to allow (them) procurement of material components at the panchayat level in MNREGS works. “Instead of retracing the steps to check corruption, the Government should plug the loopholes in the system to ensure that the money meant for the poor benefits them,” she said. (The Hindu, 11.09.2010)

In a letter to the State Panchayati Raj Secretary and Commissioner J.P. Chandala, Ms Aruna Roy also said, “there had been widespread corruption detected in purchase of material as it has been established in special audits by the Government. The funds amassed are being utilized to put pressure on the system.”

These developments in Rajasthan have been focused only to underline the serious issues of corruption involved in NREGA implementation and that social audit, now sought to be undermined by sarpanches, had helped in improving its performance to enable the unorganised rural poor get full advantage from it.

If this is happening in Rajasthan - the flagship state for NREGA implementation - are states in the rest of the country free from it? Or, the silence in the rest of the country is ominous that should be taken note of? Billions are being spent on NREGA implementation allover the country. The Union Rural Development Ministry is constantly receiving statistics from the State Rural Development Ministries about NREGA implementation in their respective spheres. These are being put on websites for all to see. No questions are being asked by parties, ruling or Opposition, or social organisations about the outcome. Government advertisements, in print and electronic media, especially latter, claim advance all over. The poverty and impoverishment statistics at grassroots, however, do not seem to have changed much.

Rajya Sabha Member Mani Shankar Aiyar, speaking on the status of UN Millennium Development Goals in India, on September 9, in New Delhi, faulted the Government on several counts. Quoting figures from the Rural Development Ministry, he said, the MNREGA had provided 100 days of work only to 30.6 per cent of all entitled households in Tripura. “Far more upsetting is that in the most poverty-stricken states, the share drops to a mere 14 per cent in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, to 8 per cent or less in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar and even further below to 6 per cent in Orissa and Uttarakhand,” Aiyar said. The all-India average is mere 6 per cent in this case.

As Ms Aruna Roy has said, the question that has really assumed importance is : Are the funds amassed by rural vested interests being utilized to put pressure on the system? Maybe, also, to silence the critics as part of building pressure on the system. (IPA Service)