The Hindu : Work in a time of drought

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Saturday, May 10, 2003

Opinion

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Work in a time of drought

By C. Rammanohar Reddy

It is criminal that the main rural employment programme is being used to benefit the local contractors, the landed and the politically powerful and not the rural labourers.

NOW, IN the middle of summer, the full impact of the poor 2002 monsoon and the cumulative effect of years of a wasteful use of water resources are being felt. From the central, northwestern and southern parts of the country come news reports of drinking water sources in villages drying up and people migrating in search of water, food and work. The monsoon of 2003 is just weeks away, but when it is a question of survival that is too far in the future to be of any relevance. But in the Central and State Governments, there is no sign of any urgency. The Task Force of Union Ministers on drought that was constituted in the wake of the failure of the last year's monsoon appears to have gone into hibernation. And little is heard of any initiatives from the State Governments.

Fortunately, where the Executive has failed the Courts are showing a little more sensitivity to issues of survival. Last week, the Supreme Court, in a fresh set of orders delivered during hearings of the two-year-old writ petition on the right to food, directed that the Centre double allocations over the next three months for the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana (SGRY), the rural employment programme that is administered by the States. The Centre has been told to allocate an additional 1.25 million tonnes of cereals for the SGRY and provide funds of Rs. 937.5 crores and the States to put in their share of Rs. 312.5 crores. Unfortunately, it is one thing for the Courts to direct the Executive to act; it is another thing for the Centre and the States to fulfil their commitments. The Supreme Court had in late 2001 ordered that all State Governments implement the Central Government mid-day meals scheme for school children. While some did implement the judicial order, States where malnutrition is among the most severe — such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand — are yet to do so. Now, a week after the Court's order on the SGRY, there is silence at the Centre and in the States.

As in most government welfare programmes, there have been problems in implementation of the SGRY. Set up with much fanfare in 2001, as an amalgamation of the earlier rural employment programmes of the Centre, the SGRY was expected to create 100 crore person-days of employment a year for rural labour in public works programmes organised by gram panchayats and zilla parishads. Labour employed in SGRY schemes is paid a mixture of cash and grain, the cereals coming from the Centre's stocks. On paper, the official statistics claim that this has been achieved in more than half-measure. In 2001-02, 52.3 crore person-days of employment were generated and the next year, in 2002-03, the figure was 50.51 crore person-days. A "special" stream of the SGRY has been the main route of Central funding for 15 drought-afflicted States over the past year.

However, as the recent report of the Commissioner appointed by the Supreme Court in the right to food petition shows, the SGRY suffers from many flaws in design and execution. First, at the very basic level of funding, the Centre has been more than niggardly in making allocations. In 2002-03, it under-funded the SGRY by providing little for the cost of grain supplied. This, as the Commissioner's Report points out, was subsequently corrected in Supplementary Grants. An initial allocation of just Rs. 600 crores for the food component of the SGRY was later increased to more than Rs. 5,000 crores. Yet, the Centre has followed the same path in the budget for 2003-04. The food component of the SGRY has this year been provided only Rs. 760 crores. Second, in the States the working of the SGRY runs counter to many of its objectives. Again, according to the Commissioner's Report, the more deprived States which should be showing a greater enthusiasm for executing the SGRY are doing precisely the opposite. And within the States, the SGRY is absent precisely where the need is more: less activity is to be found in the more backward areas of each State. Third, the old problem of fudging of muster rolls and payment of less than minimum wages is common.

A new phenomenon, highlighted by the Commissioner to the Court, has been cutting at the very roots of the SGRY and casts doubts on the achievements in employment generation that have been claimed on paper. The SGRY is supposed to be a rural employment programme, but increasingly mechanical earth-moving equipment such as excavators and trucks are being used for work that can be done by unskilled labour. In other words, the SGRY is showing all the signs of becoming less of an employment programme and more like any other public works programme. A complete ban on use of mechanical equipment is impracticable; but the violation of guidelines leading to the preference for use of capital-intensive equipment defeats the very purpose of the SGRY. It is not a question of which is more "efficient", capital or labour. Nor is it a question of funds better invested now which will yield more employment growth later. It is nothing more than a question of an employment programme at a time of distress being subverted for other ends. It is criminal that the main rural employment programme is being used to benefit the local contractors, the landed and the politically powerful and not the rural labourers for whom it was designed.

The fundamental problem with the SGRY is that it is "a supply-driven and not demand-driven programme" as the Commissioner describes it. That is, it is not an employment guarantee programme in which the State provides unskilled/semi-skilled employment in villages whenever and wherever a certain number of labourers demand work. This was the foundation of the Employment Guarantee Scheme of Maharashtra of the 1970s, which has been the model for all employment/food-for-work schemes that have followed, except that in practice the guarantee part of the programme has been abandoned.

The usual argument against a rural employment guarantee scheme is that, one, it is beyond the financial capacity of the Central and State Governments, and, two, it is administratively impossible to administer. This is both true and false. It is true that it will be, in the present scheme of things, financially and administratively impossible to provide work — even if only in the rural areas — for everyone who demands it at any time. But it is not true that an employment guarantee scheme cannot be implemented at a time of distress or in areas which suffer from chronic problems of under-employment. This can be a beginning of a programme in which the financial and administrative challenges can easily be met. In a different but similar proposal, the Commissioner's Report suggests that an EGS-type of programme can be taken up in small areas.

With greater or less suffering, the rural poor will struggle through the summer of 2003. But that does not mean that with the advance of the monsoon of 2003 the need for state-organised rural employment will disappear. There is first the uncertainty about the next monsoon. A monsoon that is even remotely like last year will spell disaster for much of rural India. There is also the larger and more basic problem of inadequate work in the villages, a phenomenon that has been made worse in recent years by the poor growth of agriculture and the slowing down of rural diversification.

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