-------------------------------------------------
Rural assets for employment (Editorial)
-------------------------------------------------
Corruption, we know, takes myriad forms in India. The Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), the country's main opposition party, believes that it's
epitomised in railway minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, and wants his head.
The
fallout: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill has been delayed.
It
awaits clearance of a parliamentary standing committee headed by a BJP
member who along with his party associates has decided not to go to
work.
Corruption, as I said, comes in many forms.
The employment bill, you will recall, was introduced in Parliament in
December, 2004, after much bickering over the money to be spent on
providing rights of employment to millions of poor in the country.
Finally, a "watered down" bill was drafted; it guarantees at least
100-day
wage employment in every financial year to every household whose adult
members volunteers do unskilled manual work. The government maintains
that
restricting this guarantee to the poorest 150 districts would cost the
exchequer Rs 9,000 crore annually.
The bill's critics rile this as expenditure that will lead to nothing.
But
that's only one possibility. The other possibility is that the bill
could
actually change the economic futures of millions of Indians. But to do
this, we will have to focus, not on the quantum of money, but on what
it
is spent and how it is spent. In other words, the employment programme
has
to be integrated into the country's developmental programme. But even
the
votaries of the bill see it primarily as welfare: doling out work to
the
poor in return for which they get money and can buy food to tide over
another drought. But this bill can be the answer to drought and
economic
destitution: it can provide not just drought relief, but relief against
drought.
To make jobs work for development we must focus on much more than the
mechanics of spending money. We must understand that the biggest
employment opportunity in the country exists in creating and
maintaining
rural assets: trees, grazing lands, water harvesting structures roads
and
other infrastructure. These rural assets require investment of labour.
The
question, we need to ask, is why do these assets that get built in one
season are lost in another? What can we do to ensure that the labour
invested in rural regeneration leads to durable and productive assets?
That's the challenge of the new generation of employment programme.
Currently, the programme is designed for unproductive employment
generation: digging holes to fill them with earth and then digging them
again. The road constructed one year, using the labour of the poor,
will
be washed away the next season. The check-dam built one year will be
gone
by the next. The sapling, planted one year, will wither away the next.
It
is precisely this hole that must be plugged. But for this, the
employment
programme has to become the basis of village level developmental
activity.
The labour of the poor should be used to build the natural capital
But asset building is not merely about jobs. Assets require clarity of
ownership and stake in management. Currently, the programme is designed
to
create employment for building public (actually governmental) assets:
roads, schools and ponds. The problem is that these governmental assets
are nobody's assets. Moreover, government agencies at the village level
are fractured and so, implementation of their programmes gets distorted
as
well.
Take water structures. A pond requires a catchment. But even as the
employment programme uses labour to dig the pond, its catchment is
controlled by government departments: say, the forest department or the
revenue department. The pond probably belongs to the panchayat (if it
is
small) or the irrigation department (if it is large). Anyhow, the pond
remains, what it is not meant to be, a hole in the ground: it has no
water
and can't charge the groundwater - a typical example of unproductive
employment.
The question then is to ask is who can best create durable assets?
Fractured bureaucracies will provide fractured answers. And, efforts to
consolidate all programmes will lead to time-consuming turf wars
between
departments. The answer then is to find the owners of the asset and
provide them legal rights to manage these resources. To do this we will
need to integrate employment generation with decentralisation and put
jobs
into the domain of the panchayats. We will also need the different land
and water bureaucracies of the state to function as line agencies of
the
panchayat so that the assets created are planned, owned and operated by
communities, not faceless agencies. With innovation in systems of
governance - strengthening the accountability of panchayats through
gram
sabhas (village assemblies), putting the transfer of money in public
domain - the money can actually reach those it's meant for. And then,
be
made to work.
The bill is critical. Not only because it will provide employment. But
because, if it is operationalised correctly, it could root out the very
corruption that BJP is apparently so agitated about. Let's be clear
that
in the hierarchy of corruption, high-level corruption, however
despicable,
is less destructive than the low level corruption that pervades the
daily
lives of Indians and makes delivery of governmental programmes a
complete
farce. The answer to this malaise - made famous by former prime
minister
Rajiv Gandhi' statement, that only 15 paise of each rupee spent reaches
the poor - is to have transparent and accountable systems.
It is time we counted real change.
- Sunita Narain
Read the complete editorial online >>
http://www.downtoearth.org.in/cover_nl.asp?mode=2
Write to the editor:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
