The disconcerting admission about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or MNREGA, came in a paper released today by Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on the main challenges facing the programme and the reforms required.
Checking distress migration is a key objective of the scheme, other than providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a year to one member of every rural household.
Even the target of 100 days is yet to be achieved: the average has fallen from 54 in 2009-10 to 47 in 2010-11, data compiled by Ramesh’s ministry show.
The MNREGA is a demand-driven programme under which the gram sabha is supposed to estimate the volume of work and approve the labour budget — the number of workers needed to carry out the jobs — for each financial year. But current practice shows a labour budget is prepared on the basis of the previous year’s performance and guess-estimates are made about the number of labourers likely to be required.
The process leads to a situation where prospective workers are not assured of work when they need it the most. This explains the persistence of migration even from those villages where the scheme is active.
The labour budgets are presented before the gram sabhas for approval on October 2 — the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi — each year. But this is too late in the year to prevent migration, the draft released today by Ramesh says, and suggests a deadline of August 15.
Others suggested, however, that the main reason was the low wages. “The wage rate is Rs 110-120 per day. Labourers get more if they migrate to other states. So the wage rate has to be increased,” said T. Haque, director of the Hyderabad-based Council of Social Development.
Another problem highlighted in the draft is that the gram panchayats have to seek financial sanction from the officers at the block level before starting any work, causing delays.
The draft also mentioned delayed wages and said the states have to streamline the payment cycle to ensure that the workers do not have wait long for their money. At least two-thirds of the MNREGA projects should focus on developing land and water resources, the draft said and also suggested steps to increase awareness about the scheme.
Ramesh himself has written a foreward to the draft where he says the reform proposals have been prepared on the basis of suggestions from the Planning Commission, the Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council as well as other stakeholders.
The public can give their feedback over the next three weeks, after which the proposals will be finalised. To begin with, the reforms could be implemented in 2,000 of the country’s poorest blocks, Ramesh said in his note.