NREGS, the Centre’s Rs40,000-crore flagship rural employment guarantee scheme, is “patchy” and “rudderless”. This is not an independent opinion, but the assessment of an internal group on transparency and accountability in the scheme. The group was set up by Central Employment Guarantee Council (CEGC), the supreme body governing NREGS. CEGC has members from the government and NGOs.
In its report, which was taken up by the ministry of rural development on Friday, group chairperson Aruna Roy slams the government for failing to act against “large-scale and unchecked corruption” in NREGS and urges it to plug loopholes in the world’s biggest welfare scheme as soon as possible.
Roy, whose working group was tasked with suggesting measures
to bring transparency in implementation of NREGA, blames the Centre for failing to enact in-built anti-corruption provisions, even five years after the scheme was launched to help the rural poor.
The report points out that the government watered down provisions relating to social audits in 2008, making it easy for corrupt panchayat officials. Many panchayat heads are known to enroll fictitious beneficiaries in the scheme to appropriate money, pay low wages or discriminate in allotting work to villagers.
Roy specifically targets what she calls a “disabling” amendment by the ministry of rural development to a clause on conducting a “social audit” on implementation of the scheme at the panchayat level. Social audits involve scrutiny of a programme before a large public audience.
Roy points out that the government changed the clause to prevent people outside a gram sabha (village), such as social activists, from helping villagers make sense of the numbers.
“The clause as amended restricts and disables a process that must be open to any Indian citizen by assisting, facilitating and empowering people in gram sabhas, rather than leaving them at the mercy of the powerful feudal and corrupt forces that have siphoned off funds and resources with impunity,” she notes in her letter to CEGC, of which she is a member.
“The present impasse brought about by the formulation of clause 13(b) is giving a free hand to corrupt elements, leading to large-scale and unchecked corruption, and encouraging the use of force and violence against people’s efforts to monitor implementation [of NREGS],” she says, hinting at criminal efforts by corrupt local officials to intimidate activists.
Roy, founder of workers’ rights organisation Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, also pulls up the government for “failing to take sufficient substantive initiatives” to make rules under the Act to
institutionalise transparency and lower corruption.
On the other hand, she points out that the government chose to disown its “operational guidelines” for states after accounts watchdog Comptroller and Auditor General highlighted “critical gaps” in them.
“The sidelining of the only set of guiding principles made NREGA, to an extent, rudderless. This massive programme is operating in an undefined operational paradigm,” she claims.
The report also highlights the government’s failure to come up with a mechanism to generate effective feedback, monitor and punish as laid down in the NREG Act.
“One of the biggest lacunae in the implementation of NREGA is the flagrant violation of the basic entitlements of the worker with impunity,” Roy says.
She says there is no authority to which workers can report corruption. Even the district ombudsman, Roy points out, is yet to get his teeth in the form of enabling rules to be notified by the Centre.
“The present framework does not provide an effective grievance redressal mechanism to report violations, or a forum for acting on the acts of commission and omission on the part of government functionaries,” she says, calling for putting all NREGA-related information in the public domain.
Comments