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DEVELOPMENT-INDIA
Job Guarantee Plan Upsets Rural Pecking Order
By Kiran Bhatty
HARDOI, Uttar Pradesh, Dec 15, 2006 (IPS) - A new law guaranteeing rural employment may be changing centuries-old power relations in India's villages. Dirt-poor villagers, denied work or cheated, have dared defy local authorities and testify against them in a people's court attended by top government officials.
Some 1,500 women and men from 50 villages participated in the public meeting in Sandila, 75 km west of Lucknow, capital of northern Uttar Pradesh state, to review the functioning of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) which is both a poverty alleviation programme and a powerful catalyst of social change in rural India. Launched in 200 districts in 14 states earlier this year, it promises 100 days of wage labour to one adult member of every rural household that volunteers for unskilled work.
A mass social audit of the implementation of the law conducted by Asha, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) headed by Sandeep Pandey - winner of the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay award for emergent leadership in 2002 - detected very serious problems in two blocks in Hardoi district.
Administrators and pradhans (village chiefs) of Sandila and Hardoi blocks, entrusted with the task of implementing NREGS, were found to have blatantly misused their powers to forge muster rolls, siphon funds and disqualify legitimate job seekers.
Implementation of the law was skewed by hidebound caste and class distinctions that have thwarted affirmative action legislated by India's founding fathers nearly six decades ago. For generations, land-owning upper caste groups have controlled village societies as headmen, revenue officers and priests. The landless poor are mainly from among the lower castes, minority Muslims and Dalits (those outside the Hindu caste system).
The findings of the social audit were made public at the hearing on Dec. 2.
An elderly Dalit farm worker who was denied work under NREGS boldly testified: "Main bahut ghareeb hoon, aap log paise-wale ho; main padha-likha nahin hun, aap log gyaani ho; main Dalit hun aap Thakur-Brahmin hain, lekin aapka vote aur mera vote ek hai. Parantu mera naam voter list mein nahin hain aur isliye mujhe job card nahin mila." (I am very poor, you are rich; I am illiterate, you are knowledgeable; I am a Dalit and you are Thakur or Brahmin, yet we have one vote each. My name is not on the voters list and that is why I have not got a NREGS job card.)"
Thakurs and Brahmins (from the warrior and priestly castes respectively) continue to bully the so-called lower castes and monopolise key positions almost six decades after India became a republic and gave itself a constitution that emphasises social equality.
Under the NREGS, it is mandatory that job cards be issued to every family. But in many villages surveyed, the poorest of the poor were issued job cards only the day before the Asha teams arrived. Instead of transparency, gross irregularities and discrepancies were found everywhere with regard to employment and payment under the scheme.
In Athsalia panchayat, records showed that 25 villagers who were issued job cards were never given work - which went to 29 others who did not have job cards but had links to the village elite. Worse, the workers were not paid the full minimum wage of 58 rupees (a little over one dollar).
When asked why he shortchanged the workers, the pradhan's son (village chief) was dismissive and said his family had been village chiefs since "azadi" (independence in 1947) and the payment was made from his own money; the government would take at least six months to reimburse him.
That apart, attendance registers were inflated - workers' signatures or thumb impressions put on more days than they had actually worked, while the wages for the days they did not work were pocketed by corrupt local authorities. For NREGS' intended beneficiaries this is a double injustice: they loose out on their just wages as well as on the number of days of work that they are entitled to.
But the most striking finding here is the absolute absence of women in the NREGS. In Sandila block, for which the official records were made available, a total of only seven women were given employment. The teams did not find a single woman who had worked and worse still none of them were registered on the job cards. Even where women are the sole bread-earners in a family, job cards were denied to them.
This is contrary to the experience in other parts of the country under NREGS where similar social audits have been conducted, like Dungarpur in Rajasthan state, and Anantpur in Andhra Pradesh; also Sonebhadra in Uttar Pradesh where there has been large-scale employment of women under the job guarantee scheme.
In Hardoi and Sandila blocks caste and class divisions are formidable. At the public hearing, a "pradhan-pati" (title given to the pradhan's husband) who was unembarrassed about speaking for his wife at a public meeting, said that "women do only two kinds of work: boaaee (sowing) and kataee (cutting). They do not do mazdoori (manual work)".
Indeed, several women during the social audit complained that their men prevented them from going to work at the NREGS sites claiming that it would be a dishonour for them - "mahilaon se mazdoori karaenge to badnaami hogi". Family honour seemed to matter more than finding work to feed starving families.
In addition, the pradhan-pati's statements reflect a caste and class bias. Poor women, especially from the lower castes with fewer taboos on work, do all sorts of hard, manual labour. Keeping them out of NREGS is a denial of an assured source of employment, which only serves to keep the economic and social inequalities in villages intact.
Following the public airing of grievances, the administration has pulled up the defaulting local agencies, particularly the BDOs, and promised greater administrative vigilance and transparency. Angry local officials have retaliated by submitting a memorandum to the Rural Development Commissioner (in Lucknow, the state capital) saying that they would not do any NREGS work in their areas.
The standoff could prove to be a valuable chance to democratise village governments, and move positions of power out of upper caste families.
(END)
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