By Arun Kumar
Most villagers in U.P.'s Hardoi district, except for a miniscule few associated with social or political organizations, were not aware of the passage of the new Employment Guarantee Law last year. Since then, its coming into force in 22 districts of U.P. has not impressed them either.
By many accounts, there is a massive siphoning off of food grains from Public Distribution System in U.P. Likewise corruption in ration card allocation and the Food for Work (FFW) scheme continues, denying people food even for completed manual work. In the meantime the new National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has come in and initial reports give the impression that the bureaucracy in U.P. will not implement this scheme any differently. But first, the food grains and the food for work stories.
People's diary
In village Panchayat Atwa Danda of Hardoi District, Below Poverty Line ration card holders have not received a single food grain in the last five years. The situation is not better in other villages across the state. Antyodaya and Annapurna ration card holders, people who are living in extreme situations of poverty, consider themselves lucky if they get their quota of food grains once in 3 or 4 months. The ration shop owners, mostly in collusion with the panchayat Pradhans, keep the ration cards with themselves and by making fake entries on them, take away the food grains meant for the poor. The officials at the godown, supply inspectors, other officials and private people in the chain between the food and the beneficiaries, are happily part of the racket.
Currently the nexus of mafia and contractors, patronized by officials and politicians, has monopoly over the food grains meant for various schemes for the poor. In most cases the ration supply in full quantities doesn't reach the fair price shop in the village. And, in violation of a Supreme Court ruling, no records are available for public examination, making the whole system totally unaccountable to the people.
During the last two years we see a new phenomenon in U.P. There are reports, from mostly eastern parts, of people dying of hunger and committing suicides when they are not able to pay off their debts. In every single case the administration, of course, denies that these deaths are due to starvation and ascribes them to illness or something else. However, the fact remains that poor people are dying in large numbers and if the food grains meant for them as part of Food for Work scheme or PDS were to reach them, at least some of these deaths could have been prevented. The failure of PDS is representative of the failure of government's poverty alleviation schemes.
In Godwa Khem Village Panchayat of Hardoi District, the Ambedkar self-help group (SHG) staked a claim to desilt the Kashipur Minor (branch of a canal) under the National Food for Work scheme. Both under this scheme and the new Employment Guarantee Act, no contractors can be employed for works. There is a clear instruction that the work has to be done directly by government departments, village panchayats, SHGs or NGOs. Thus Ambedkar SHG's claim was legitimate. In addition, the villagers were also hoping to get water into the canal for irrigation. There has been no water in the canal since 1989.
The Irrigation Department chose to give work to another group of labourers on a different segment of the same canal more than 15 kms away, and even here the food component was not given. Back at Godwa Khem, after requesting the administration for over 6 months, villagers decided to begin the work on their own initiative on 2 January 2006. They have since claimed wages 1592 person-days of work put into desilting the canal. The Irrigation Department maintains that they do not intend to supply water to that point and hence cannot sanction this work. It has instead issued legal notices to 42 villagers in Godwa Khem for having illegally dug the canal!
The issue here is that Irrigation Department charges the villagers money for using water from this canal. People are routinely harassed, sometimes using arm twisting tactics, to pay up for the water from the canal even though they might not have got the water. The department is also denying people the right to work by saying that they do not intend to supply water to the point where people have desilted the canal. But the department charges people money for having used water from the same segment. The villagers are now waging a struggle to get their due wages, and also water in the canal. The Irrigation Department appears to be behaving in an arbitrary and contradictory manner. The engineer responsible at the department is R C Verma.
The new Employment Guarantee Act promises work for the rural poor, but similar norms of the FFW program continue to be blatantly violated. Contractors and machines are being employed in most cases to get the work done. Muster rolls are being fabricated with false entries and are not available for public scrutiny. As noted earlier, workers do not get their full payment, especially the 'food' component in almost never given.
A young Samajwadi Party leader, Chandrashekhar Yadav of village Dharhaura in Kushinagar district complained that machines were being used to dig a pond in violation of the norms of the FFW programme. On 25 May 2005 he discovered the anomaly and complained to the District Magistrate, the district's top bureaucrat, on 26 May. The tractor was seized and the contractor's assistant arrested. However, because of pressure from a local politician, the tractors were released after having been shown as seized under the Motor Vehicles Act, even though the tractor drivers had given it in writing that they were employed to dig the pond, i.e. a violation. Even though FIR was lodged against the contractor, the enquiry report was manipulated to let the suspects go.
In village Badhara, similar violations have been discovered. JVC machines were being used. Chandrashekhar Yadav and his colleagues resisted, but the administration did not cooperate. A complaint was lodged with the Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and Chief Secretary Neera Yadav and the charges were found to hold in the subsequent enquiry. But no action has been taken against the errant Block Development Officer, Mahendra Prasad Chaubey. In a different wages case, 48 workers of village Jaitapur Bhadewan, in Sitapur district belonging to Akhil Bhartiya Khet Mazdoor Sabha complained that they have still not been given wages and food grains for their work during the periods July-August and November last year. The work was supervised by Vijay Kumar of Rural Engineering Services department and private contractor Rukmesh.
In another case, in Nagepur village of Varanasi district, the Assistant Development Officer Srikant Darwe -- a local bureaucrat -- asked the newly elected panchayat Pradhan Mukesh to reduce the number of ration cards meant for the BPL category by three, probably a method adopted by Government to show reduction of poverty. This was Mukesh was elected president in recent local body polls about 6 months back. Currently there are 26 BPL cardholders in the village, whereas Mukesh feels there are about 35-40 people in all who should be given these cards. Given a choice, Mukesh would like to increase the number of cards; but the ADO Darwe asked him to reduce the number. Normally, village committees do not have the freedom of deciding the number of ration cards in their village, these decisions are taken by officials, and often without a comprehensive survey. Mukesh's views however were recorded in the report of a December 2005 Gorakhpur public hearing on right to food that was subsequently sent to the Supreme Court. The SC is monitoring the implementation of a number of government schemes stemming from the right to food litigation.
The challenge of making Rural Employment Guarantees work
It into this situation that rural employment guarantees are being ushered in. After the passage of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in September 2005, a British journalist Peter Foster working with The Telegraph visited village Purwa Maan in Hardoi, one of the 200 districts covered under the Act. His aim was to find out how villagers felt about the new law. Most villagers, except for a miniscule few who were associated with some social or political organizations, were not aware of the passage of the new law. They were then informed of its provisions and encouraged to respond.
Not surprisingly, they did not seem too impressed. One old man hesitatingly said that he did not expect that he would overnight start getting his full minimum due wages, which is Rs.58 for a day's of difficult labour in U.P. The situation in his area was such that one would consider himself lucky if one got Rs.30 in a private work and Rs.40 in a government work. For women labourers these rates would be even lower. 58 years after India became a democratic republic, the Act has to specify that both sexes must get equal wages, clearly implying that this is not the case right now.
Until there is transparency in maintaining muster rolls and payments are made, both that of cash and food grains, according to the rules, once in every seven days for the workers, there cannot be any guarantee of employment. But from the experience in dealing with the administrative machinery it is also clear that officials and contractors are not going to change their ways on their own. It will probably require a pro-active effort on part of the common people to organize and exert pressure on the system so that it starts delivering according to the law.
The U.P. bureaucracy will have to change its mindset. Gone are the days when they could take all decisions by themselves. They must start relying on common people and people's organizations for implementing important schemes like the Food for Work instead of the contractors and mafia, which right now exercise complete control over the machinery to the extent that the bureaucracy seems helpless. The Right to Information Act is going to make it more difficult for them to take decisions in arbitrary manner. Already, during last 3 years people in Bharawan and Sandila Blocks of Hardoi district have used a 1999 Panchayati Raj Act amendment to access income expenditure details of 30 village panchayats. This has exposed corruption on a large scale as well as put pressure on elected representatives and officials to not indulge in blatant embezzlement of funds. The people are more vigilant and officials and elected representatives feel the pressure.
Currently a struggle is going on in Hardoi district to realize the benefits of Employment Guarantee Act, improve the functioning of PDS, Mid Day Meal scheme and Anganbadis so that benefits meant for the poor, especially under the food related schemes, start reaching them. For the beneficiaries, the functioning of these schemes is a matter of life and death.
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