Dream loot for powerful

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, popularly knowns as NREGA, is the most romantic and largest development project in human history. It is extremely popular and invited widespread hatred. It embodies remarkable scope for alienated people and effortless corruption for powerful people at the lower level. The amount spent on it over the last nine years is about Rs3.50 lakh crore. The average number of jobs generated per year is less than 4 crore. The total number of infrastructure assets created is about 1.38 crore.

In a recent announcement, the Modi government has decided to implement NREGA only in 200 most backward districts. In response, some economists requested the PM not to shrink its coverage. Professional experts are divided about the empirical reality of NREGA: some groups have rosy textbook views about the scheme, while others remain doubtful about its delivery efficacy. Travelling from Kupwara to Kanyakumari and Khawzawl to Kutch to evaluate NREGA and Border Area Development Programme (BADP) at the village level on behalf of the Planning Commission, our record on their achievements is not to be trifled with. Structured and open-ended responses are collected from eight types of stakeholders of NREGA: state, district, block, GP, Focus Group (FG), workers, beneficiary non-workers (BNW) and specialised engineers. The unique feature of the study is the engineer’s evaluation of 4,000 sample assets from 100 districts in 27 states. The massive scope and extent of the projects make it nearly impossible to simplify the major findings and reach any exclusive conclusion. Any sweeping generalisation can only be construed as unjustified and pedagogic.

Let us, therefore, concentrate only on asset verification. So far 17% missing assets have been identified out of the selected samples. Results are yet to come from Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. Against this all-India 17% of all missing assets, 33% assets are missing in Karnataka (KA), 30% in Jharkhand (JH), 26% in Maharashtra (MH), 24% in Bihar (BI), 15% each in Bengal (WB) and Kerala (KE). In such a diverse nation, even state level average is awfully misleading. For example, 47% samples are missing in Mysore district, whereas 44% are missing in Nandurbar. In addition, 37%, 36%, 35%, 34%, 30% and 29% are respectively missing in Garhwa, Hazaribag, Jalna, Bangalakot, Malkangiri and Uttar Dinajpur. Interestingly, there was no asset missing in Uttarakhand (UT) and Gujarat and in some districts such as Bilaspur, Indore, Kendrapara, Shimla, Sundargarh etc.

Second, given 60:40 wage and material ratio, this 17% missing asset means that poor workers are directly cheated to the tune of Rs30,954 crore and infrastructure fund directly forfeited is about Rs20,636 crore, thereby taking the amount of total minimum direct loot to Rs51,590 crore. If one estimates this from state-wise average amount spent on each asset, the total amount of funds lost may cross Rs70,000 crore. Compared to the last five major scams across India, this is insignificant. After all, the amount is transferred to villages, and does not include the helpless vegetable-wallis’ hard-earned money through chit funds.

Third, there are two types of looting of public fund through NREGA. The above estimate is direct and naked through management information system (MIS). There are many other indirect, delicate and politically controlled ways for diverting much larger funds by the system of decentralised governance. For example, paying less and signing for full wage against any or no work; unfavourable NREGA wage compared to market wage; entirely false accounting through MIS mentioning existing public assets; paying for private works of powerful local leaders; maintaining false names of workers; inflated false material bills from powerful suppliers; unscientific wage material ratio and low quality assets; extensive use of contractors that goes against the Act.

Fourth, this study has also empirically shown that there is terrific coordination failure from state to village-level, including workers. This essentially challenges the confidence in decentralised governance system. There are innumerable small, medium and large chakravyuh in each locality particularly in regions with high population density without non-farm means of livelihood. In spite of corruption and abuse, NREGA has helped rural India avert a ‘million mutinies’ during the high growth phase of last 10 years when ‘affluence and inequality’ became the new order of ‘dualism’. From such a perspective, a single Act can hardly do justice to highly varied topography, levels of living, literacy, occupational pattern, local resources, local opportunities and the like. With astonishing mandate, the Modi administration should include extremely stringent regulations and strong penalty clauses in the Act, including complete overhauling of MIS website. Also, NREGA should accommodate parallel modules so that temperate, tropical, arid, desert, humid, delta, forest, unfertile and other unlucky regions can use it for sustainable livelihood while maintaining nature, particularly the rivers and forests. The best way to usher ina new era of rural development is to prioritise development initiatives in the relatively backward districts.

Finally, we have selected the most backward 200 districts of India on the basis of social development index made from 50 development indicators of Census 2011. These districts belong to 16 states with highest preponderance from BI, UP, MP, RJ, JH, OR, AS and WB. On other hand, 10 states do not have room for any of 200 backward districts: AP, HA, HP, KA, KE, MH, PU, SK, TN and UT. This set of backward districts gets significantly altered if the districts are selected on the basis of proportion of extremely destitute people estimated from NSSO’s 66th Round consumption expenditure. Many districts with more than 65% vulnerable people (Koraput, Malkangiri, Krishnagiri, Hailakandi, Bageshwar, Betul, Barwani, Gadchiroli, Bidar, Dharmapuri etc) do not belong to so-called backward states, which badly need NREGA. So Census or NSSO alone will not serve the cause for a nation with about 550 million youth most of whom are unskilled. The discourse on ‘demographic dividend’ will remain in textbooks if we fail to impart vocational skills to these youth depending on regional needs. Therefore, 200 most backward districts should be carefully selected on priority basis. It is impossible for a single Act to become saviour to about 625 million poor and vulnerable people living in poverty traps in rural India.

Ghosh is principal investigator MGNREGA and scientist at Economic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute; Roy is a senior journalist