JOIN USMGNREGS suffers from lacunae: Report
The draft of the evaluation, conducted by two researchers of the National Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) has found that while the rules stipulate that each worker entitled to get 100 days of employment under the scheme should have a bank account into which her/his wages are directly deposited, the wages of many workers were being transferred to a single bank account in many cases.
A matter of convenience
“This was said to have been done as a matter of convenience for workers who did not have a bank account. But it meant the wages were handed over to the holder of that bank account and not to the worker,” said the report of the evaluation conducted by Narendar Pani and Chidambaran G Iyer.
The evaluation report - Evaluation of the Impact of Processes in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in Karnataka is prepared by the NIAS at the behest of the State Planning, Programme Monitoring and Statistics Department also found that making the BPL card as the criterion for entitlement for the scheme was not helpful in identifying the poorest, for whom the scheme was meant, and tended to provide employment to others who did not fall into that category.
Labour subsidy
Another problem was that the provision in the programme of allowing poor farmers to work on their own land, which amounted to labour subsidy, tended to benefit certain class of farmers in developed areas like Malnad who were into horticulture, rather than foodgrain production.
The draft report of evaluation, the first for the MGNREGS in the State, is being circulated among officials of the Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Department among others.
The report has recommended that a one person-one account system may be incorporated into the software used to generate the wage list to avoid duplication and corruption.
It says that the chronic poor should get jobs under the Scheme. The present method of targeting the very poor is “not always effective.”
Poor land owners have the benefit of using the Scheme to work on their land, but this is not available to the landless poorest, it noted.
The study says that the levels of awareness are uneven across different regions. While the Malnad and the coastal districts as well as the South have high levels of awareness of the Scheme, the northeast and northwest regions have very low level of awareness.
Hence a portion of administrative costs of the Scheme in the State may be used to support advocacy groups working in the backward and low awareness districts. It is a fact that workers are often sent back and asked to return with a group of at least ten workers. This implies that jobs are not immediately available when a worker want them, it observed.
Some observations
* Process of assessing labour budget is arbitrary
* Option of working on their own farms be given to only those growing food crops
* But the very poor can exempted from this condition
* Gram Panchayats must record number of households benefiting for every
Rs 10,000 spent
* GPs should carry out measurement of work to avoid delay in payment of wages
* Monitoring of Scheme should both in terms of process & outcomes
* Social audits not effective