In MP’s Bundelkhand region, a sarpanch-babu nexus means NREGA benefits dry up for the poor
The Paper Trail
How social sector cuts are playing out in one of India’s poorest parts
For the first time ever, in 2014, Rs 1,000 cr, of a sanctioned Rs 4,000 cr budget for NREGA, not given to MP
In 2015, only a small part of the budget released for two months. NREGA
top officials say funds always given for at least six months.
Government records show an average of 68 days work per person per year;
on the ground, many haven’t worked 50 days in five years
In nearly empty villages, after majority migrate for work, all NREGA work performed by machines
Wages found credited to accounts of government employees and even the
dead. District officials refuse to part with data; say it’s been erased
from their computers.
***
A group of them, about 20 old
and young men, are engrossed in a game of cards under the banyan tree,
shielded from the two o’ clock sun on a May afternoon. No distractions
here, they take five minutes to finish the round of teen patti. “If
you’d come here three days later, the village would be nearly empty,”
says 35-year-old Lala Ram. “Our break is almost over and we are going
back to Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan or wherever the thekedar decides to
take us this time.”
They had just returned, less than 10 days
ago, for the seasonal break after their four-month migratory season. The
‘able-bodied’ in every Dalit household in Kalothra village, Tikamgarh
district, are out for at least eight months a year. They work in
different parts of the country as daily-wage labour. In a majority of
the district’s 800-odd villages, it’s only the very old and the very
young—those incapable of doing any manual labour—that stay back. The
neighbouring Nora, Asati and Sendri villages are already almost empty.
The
situation in Tikamgarh, one of Bundelkhand’s six poverty-ridden
districts, is no exception, the entire region is starved of natural
resources, industry, healthcare facilities, sanitation, even water. The
livelihood guarantee scheme, NREGA, came to Tikamgarh in its very first
phase, in 2006, in the backdrop of a long spell of drought that wasted
the region between 2001-08. Distress migration, a common phenomenon
across Bundelkhand, increased significantly after the drought.
Interestingly,
government records of NREGA implementation in the region, since its
inception, reflect an impeccable growth of livelihood opportunities in
these districts. On an average, Rs 310 crore is spent on wages and
material cost every year in Bundelkhand, with close to 40,000 works
being sanctioned, and nearly 30,000 of them being completed.
But
if most villages are almost empty through the year, with the entire
working population migrating out, who then is demanding this NREGA work?
Who is undertaking them? And who, in fact, is completing them? “The JCB
machines do all the work here. From digging out mud to mixing cement,
laying roads, everything is done by machines,” says 40-year-old Gorelal
Banskar inthe Lidhora Taal village. “Last year, when I came back for a
few days after working at a construction site in Faridabad, the road
here and the graveyard were being built by the JCB and a few relatives
of the sarpanch.”
Across villages, hardly anybody knows about
works being sanctioned in their village and neither are they informed
about job opportunities. “In the last five years put together, I got a
maximum of 50 days of NREGA. If we had got work here, why would all of
us migrate?” asks Ramesh Ahirwar, who takes 12-year-old son and wife on
his wage-hunting trips, leaving behind two very young daughters with his
parents in Asati village. “The sarpanches here spend lakhs to win the
election. During the five years they are in power, they ensure they earn
ten times as much.” True to his word, uniformly sparkling white Boleros
are parked outside most sarpanch houses—sticking out in a region where
even owning a bullock cart is an indicator of opulence.
“If we
didn’t go out and depended on NREGA alone, we wouldn’t even be able to
buy five kgs of atta. Our children would die of hunger,” says Lala Ram.
“When we leave, we borrow Rs 1,000 from the upper castes here and give
it to our parents to buy food for them and the children. When we come
back, after 3-4 months, we pay an interest of Rs 500 for every Rs 1,000.
Still it leaves some money with the family to sustain them for the next
few months while we are away.”
Please click here to read more.