by Vivek Kaul
b) As mentioned earlier, the MGNREGA mandates that any decision regarding the choice of works to be undertaken needs to be made in open assemblies of the Gram Sabha. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. In an example from Mokhada, in the Palghar district of Maharashtra, the shelf of projects is not generated through a participatory process involving people (as is mandated).
This results in the work that is being provided not being looked upon as an asset but just as a way of earning a wage. This makes it difficult to mobilise labour for these activities, given that they are not viewed from a developmental perspective. Furthermore, whenever there was an exaggerated measurement in the records that were kept, in comparison to the actual physical structure on the worksite, it was found that the records were fudged. The corresponding muster rolls showed fake names or names of workers who had either died or migrated and not worked on the structure at all.861
The workers had said that the measurements of the work done had been taken after the work was completed, with nothing being done while the work was in progress. The records, on the other hand, showed progressive measurements. The audit that was carried out could not identify 70 per cent of the structures that were built as per the records because of the absence of display boards.862
In fact, Mokhada is also a great example of the narrow lower end of the funnel when it comes to the implementation of Big Government schemes. In 2012-2013, eight engineers, working with two technical assistants, were supposed to handle 560 works spread across 28 Gram Panchayats in the Mokhada block. In the Jawhar block, also in the Palghar district, the situation was far worse. Eight engineers, along with two technical assistants, were expected to handle 1,039 works spread across 50 Gram Panchayats. In the Vikramgadh block in the Thane district, four engineers, along with two technical assistants, were supposed to manage 860 works spread across 43 Gram Panchayats.863
The engineers in the Jawhar block dedicated 60 per cent of their working hours to NREGA activities. As NC Narayanan and Nitin Lokhande write in a research paper titled ‘Designed to Falter—MGNREGA Implementation in Maharashtra’ regarding the Jawhar block:864
The available technical capacity at the block and GP [i.e., Gram Panchayat] levels is grossly inadequate to design, monitor and evaluate the available works…. At the block level, the engineers and technical assistants were so preoccupied with the measurement of the completed works and the preparation of wage payment orders that they did not have the time to design, supervise and provide technical guidance for ongoing work.
Furthermore, the technical assistants were generally graduates in agriculture and had no prior experience in technical aspects like earth moving or construction, which are important parts of the MGNREGS. Also, while carrying out the job demand analysis, the key stakeholders (i.e., the gram sarpanches, the gram sabhas as well as the gram rozgar sahayaks) were supposed to use the previous year’s data using the Management Information System (MIS). None of the stakeholders used the MIS or even knew about it for that matter. They carried out the job demand analysis simply on the basis of the job applications that they had received.865
As Narayanan and Lokhande point out:866
The sequence of activities that is expected to be carried out – initial surveys, designs and uploading of photographs before and after the completion of works – was not properly done due to a paucity of staff. It was clear from the interaction with the engineers that not all worksites were visited for initial surveys. Previous design and estimation sheets were used as references, making appropriate changes in dimensions and costs. With such a procedure, it is not a durable asset that is designed, but a structure to meet the objective of job creation [emphasis added].
c) The other big problem with the MGNREGS is at a very fundamental level. TH Chowdhary, the founding Chairman of Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (VSNL), made a very interesting point in a December 2011 column. As he wrote: “Villages cannot sustain so many unskilled labourers.... By creating useless ‘work’, we are promoting dependency among the unfortunate rural… and unskilled population.”867
Chowdhary gave the example of the village of Angaluru in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh. Out of the 1,000 families in the village, 800 had registered themselves as below the poverty line and sought work under the MGN-REGS. As mentioned earlier, the MGNREGA guarantees 100 days of work per year. If all the families are to get work, this would mean creating 80,000 man-days of work in the village, year after year, which is simply not possible. Chowdhary suggests that this leads to people getting paid for little or no work.868
d) The wage bill for the MGNREGS is paid by the central government. Nevertheless, the wage rates are set by the respective state governments. This gives the state-level politicians the flexibility to keep raising the wages, which is what most of them do. 869 On May 1, 2007, the daily wage rate in the state of Odisha (then Orissa) was raised from Rs. 55 per day to Rs. 70 per day.
A survey was carried out among 1,938 households which participated in the MGNREGS between March and June 2007. This was done so as to determine whether the increase in the daily wages was actually passed on to the individuals working on the MGNREGS worksites. The result was very interesting. As Niehaus and Sukhtankar point out: “What is striking is that none [emphasis original] of the wage increase was passed through to [the] workers. Thus, while [the] average leakage from wage payments prior to the policy change was close to 0 per cent, [the] marginal leakage was 100 per cent.”870
And it wasn’t as if the workers were not aware of the increase in wage rates. 72 per cent of the respondents were aware of the fact that the wages had been increased. 81 per cent of these were even aware of the new wages of Rs. 70 per day. Nevertheless, this did not mean that these individuals earned higher wages starting from May 1, 2007.871
In fact, responses to the survey indicated that many people would do nothing major about this leakage or lack of payment to them. 22 per cent of the respondents said that they would do nothing if they faced problems. Multiple reasons were offered by those who said they wouldn’t complain: (i) Complaining won’t be of any help (37 per cent); (ii) It would be too time consuming or take too much effort (53 per cent): An average village in the sample was 17 kilometres from the block development office and 38 kilometres from the district office. The estimated average roundtrip time was three hours and five hours, respectively; (iii) Around one-tenth of those who had said that they wouldn’t complain feared retribution.872
75 per cent said that they would take up the issue with the local panchayat officials or the village elders. The local panchayat officials are the ones responsible for implementing the MGNREGS. Only 7.4 per cent of the responses indicated that they would file a complaint with the block development officer, who acts as the programme officer of the MGNREGS at the block level. Only 0.1 per cent said that they would write a letter to an MLA or an MP. (The percentages add up to more than 100% because multiple responses were allowed for.)873
While people don’t complain, it is worth pointing out that, even if they did, Article 311(2) of the Indian Constitution says that no civil servant can be dismissed without an enquiry. This makes it difficult to fire someone outright.874
The interesting question is: When people don’t bother to complain, why bother paying them at all? Indeed, before the increase in payment in Orissa from Rs. 55 per day to Rs. 70 per day, the average leakage of payments was very low.
For the elected officials, such as the sarpanch, it might make sense to make the payments, given that elections need to be fought in the years to come. Also, as Niehaus and Sukhtankar point out:875
Hiring a worker to do some work makes it less risky to over-report a good deal more. For example, it may seem safer to claim that it took 150 person-days to dig a hole in the ground when there actually is a hole in the ground that took 50 person-days to dig than when there is no hole at all. More generally, paying a worker to do some work may increase the amount one can safely over-report by more than enough to make it profitable.<
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In fact, the data also suggested that the officials in charge of running the MGNREGS reported more fictitious work on wage projects when the daily wage rate was increased. The cost to the government per dollar received by the beneficiaries went up from $4.08 to $5.03.xx
In fact, the total amount of illicit wealth being generated by those in charge of implementing the MGNREGS is huge. As Niehaus and Sukhtankar point out: “The contrasts are stark. The estimated rate of rent extraction per panchayat is roughly 150 times the rate at which the sarpanch[e]s are compensated, and the rate per block is 1,100 times the rate at which Block Development Officers are compensated.”876
e) Research on the MGNREGS has shown that “workers paid through banks receive significantly higher wages”. 877 While those having bank accounts get paid higher wages, there are other issues at play. The penetration of banks in rural India is very low. Hence, the last mile of getting money into the hands of the householders is a problem.878 This leads to such problems as the MGNREGS workers having to travel long distances to collect their payments.
As Aggarwal writes in the context of Jharkhand:879
Delays in processing wage payments and [the] risks of siphoning off are lower in the banking system. But banks have their own problems. Despite the central government’s much touted Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana for financial inclusion, opening bank accounts in rural Jharkhand is still a harrowing experience for MGNREGS workers. Due to the limited number of bank branches in rural areas, workers often have to make long trips at their own expense to access the banks. The bank branches are usually crowded and suffer from shortages of bank staff, and the MGNREGS workers often have to wait for a long time to withdraw their wages. Work comes to a virtual standstill in the absence of electricity or [the] internet at the bank branches, forcing workers to make another trip to open their account or withdraw their wages.
Often, banks simply refuse to open accounts for workers. In the Satgawan block in the Kodarma district in Jharkhand, there was the case of the Bank of India refusing to open accounts for 600 workers. In March 2015, these workers complained to the deputy commissioner about being unable to work under the MGNREGS because they did not have a bank account. It was only after the district official intervened that the bank got around to opening accounts for these workers.880
f) One reason that the poor do not have access to public services is primarily believed to be the fact that they do not have information about their rights. This is believed to be the decisive factor behind why the poor do not demand what is due to them.881
A study was carried out in Bihar, one of the poorest states in the country, targeting 150 villages and more than 5,000 respondents. The idea was to check how well the people knew what they were entitled to under the MGNREGS. Their knowledge regarding the MGNREGS is important, because although around 56 per cent of the population in Bihar lives below the poverty line, yet only 10 per cent participated in the MGNREGS.882
The results were very interesting and showed that there was a huge information gap, with many people not knowing their rights under the MGNREGA. 73 per cent of women and 95 per cent of men had heard of the MGNREGS (or actually the state-level equivalent of it, the Bihar Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme). Nevertheless, only 11 per cent of women and 37 per cent of men knew that they were entitled to 100 days of work under the MGNREGS. Half of the men and women knew that they could demand work. When it came to those below the poverty line, 38 per cent of women and 53 per cent of men knew that they could demand work.883
Only 2 per cent of women and 7 per cent of men knew that the work once demanded had to be provided within 15 days. Only 11 per cent of women and 29 per cent of men knew that if work was not provided after it had been demanded, an unemployment allowance had to be paid. 21 per cent of women and 44 per cent of men knew about the wage rate. Only 11 per cent of women and 24 per cent of men knew that contractors are not allowed under the scheme.884
In fact, the knowledge levels regarding the MGNREGS were equally abysmal on other important questions that were asked. The surprising finding of the survey was that there was very little awareness that the right to work under the MGNREGS is a universal right for rural households and is not limited to specific groups.885
Based on this realisation, the researchers carrying out the survey decided to plan an information campaign that would stress on the fact that “potential workers needed to demand work in order to get it”. With this basic idea in mind, a 25-minute movie with an entertaining and emotionally engaging storyline was made with professional Bihari actors acting in the film.
The basic storyline of the movie was fairly straightforward. It showed a temporary migrant worker returning to the village from the city to be in the company of his wife and daughter. He learns that work under the MGNREGS is available in his village, even though it is a lean season. This means that he can stay with his friends and family and work in the village and make some money, and hence, does not have to return to the city to earn money. The idea was that the audience would relate to the characters and, in the process, important information would be conveyed as well.886
Between mid-February 2010 and mid-March 2010, the film was screened in 40 out of the 150 villages where the survey had earlier been carried out. The original survey had been carried out between May and July 2009. The film was shown twice in each village. 89 per cent of those watching the movie reported that the information in the movie was somewhat new to them.
The movie increased the knowledge of the programme among the people who saw it, at least in comparison to what they knew about it earlier. There was a 53 per cent increase in the number of people knowing about the number of days they were allowed to work under the MGNREGS. There was a 36 per cent increase in the number of people who now knew about the wage rate. There was a one-third increase in the number of those knowing about the unemployment insurance and a 70 per cent increase in the number of those knowing that work had to be given within two weeks of it being asked for.887
As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating of it. So did the movie lead to better participation rates? Did it lead to more work and more money for people? The movie led to 5.1 more days of employment for the illiterate in comparison to those who were better educated. This meant a gain of around Rs. 487 in wages per person, at the rate of Rs. 95 per day. This gain was very small in comparison to the excess demand for work under this scheme. The researchers had also asked the people, during the course of the survey, how many days of extra work they would have liked under the MGNREGS. The average answer turned out to be 44 days.888
What this basically means is that even knowing about your rights isn’t enough to get them. As Martin Ravallion, Dominique van de Walle, Puja Dutta and Rinku Murgai, the researchers who studied Bihar, write in a research paper titled ‘Try Telling People Their Rights? On Making India’s Largest Antipoverty Program in India’s Poorest State’:889
Learning one’s rights in this setting is clearly not the same thing as being empowered to demand those rights…. What one considers one’s ‘rights’ in an Indian village (say) may depend more on what local officials and elites say than rather abstract central dictates in official legislation, far removed from the realities of daily life. Possibly, people do not know their rights because there is no point [in] knowing them when the reality of their lives does not admit those rights in practice. An information campaign will not then be sufficient for people to be willing and able to take action to get what they are due.
g) All this is not to say that the MGNREGS has been a total failure and created nothing of use till date. In a study carried out across twenty districts in Maharashtra, 4,266 completed works were assigned for verification. It was found that 87 per cent of these were bonafide projects. An overwhelming number of these works supported farming activities. These included land levelling and digging wells, ponds, irrigation channels, trenches, etc. Around 90 per cent of the households in these districts which were surveyed felt that the a
ssets that were built under the MGNREGS were very useful or, at least, somewhat useful.890
This study comes with the disclaimer that it “captures the perceptions of users on quality—their own ideas of what they consider… [as] unacceptable or [of] poor quality.” It doesn’t make judgements of quality in the technical sense on the basis of design specification, quality of materials used, and so on.891
Another interesting study was carried out in Jharkhand. In 2010, the Jharkhand government ordered the construction of 50 irrigation wells in each panchayat in the state under the MGN-REGA. By November 2013, nearly 1.15 lakh wells had been sanctioned. Government estimates suggest that 80 per cent of these wells have been completed. A study was carried out to check these claims, and physical visits were made to 926 wells built under the MGNREGS. It was found that nearly 60 per cent of the wells sanctioned under the scheme had been built. In fact, the number rises to 70 per cent if the wells completed till the ground level (i.e., without the parapet) are also included. The study further found that 96 per cent of the completed wells were being utilised and that 95 per cent were being utilised for irrigation.892
The researchers found that the annual average rate of return on the expenditure incurred on a completed well was 6.5 per cent per year. This means that the expenses incurred by the government as well as the well owners in constructing the well could be recovered in a period of 15.4 years, on an average.893
It was further found that the government rarely covered the entire expense for constructing the well on private land. In fact, 87 per cent of those with completed wells had to spend money out of their own pockets for constructing the well. Interestingly, 36 per cent of those whose wells had been completed had to take a loan to complete it. Another 9 per cent had to mortgage a movable or immovable asset to fund their wells. Despite this, 96 per cent of the owners with completed wells were happy at having constructed the well. 92 per cent were satisfied with the quality of the well, and 85 per cent felt that their incomes had risen because of the well.894