National Highway

If foreign correspondents do better reporting about India, is it any surprise that one of the best Indian bloggers should be a foreigner? And a foreign journalist at that. I do enjoy reading Peter Foster a lot these days, and no, this is not to suck up to him.

a social audit was conducted recently in andhra pradesh ‘to know field-level problems in the implementation (of the employment guarantee scheme), problems of labourers, quality of works, payment of wages, attendance register and measurement of works’..

the audit was conducted, from september 2-7th, in all the 13 districts in the state in which the scheme is being implemented .’A report would be prepared based on the findings and sent to the Central Government.’ but the ‘findings’ are already being discussed in certain local television channels – not willing to wait for certain ‘conscientious’ national journalists to come along and ‘discover’ them – like the farmers’ suicides were, for instance.

but before i delve into the findings, as reported by the media, i’d like to go back to a news report published by the hindu in may, just a few weeks ago : ‘Four months after the launch of the national job guarantee scheme, Andhra Pradesh has emerged as a frontrunner in implementing the scheme, putting in place a “foolproof mechanism” in planning works and disbursal of wages. Addressing a press conference here on Sunday, Mr Jairam Ramesh, Union Minister of State for Commerce, said the State had prepared an elaborate system that was transparent and accountable.’

i agree with the minister that the scheme is ‘elaborate’ – all such schemes launched by the government usually are. and also ’smart’ and ‘pro-poor’.but..the hindu had always seemed to like the nregs – and it hadn’t ever spared any newsprint in expressing its love for the scheme. and i hope it’ll go out, at least now, and check whether the minister had been talking through his hat…or is the implementation truly ‘foolproof’, ‘transparent’ and ‘accountable’.
 
the scheme is being implemented in 13 districts in andhra pradesh (200 in the country as a whole) including all the districts of telangana, except hyderabad, three of the four districts in rayalaseema and two districts of coastal andhra. all of them have citizenry with average incomes hovering around and below the national average, a third of the districts fall in a rain shadow region. roughly ten percent or less of the area covered by these districts has access to assured irrigation, most of them have suffered from drought for periods ranging from 3-8 years in the last ten years…in short, the poor in all of these districts need help. from god and government. and what do they get? a cruel joke in the form of the egs.

approximately, 37 lakh (not 39 lakh as the minister says) people applied for jobcards, around 5 lakh were provided work, 9.8 % of the budget allotted was spent – in a state that’s a ‘frontrunner’.

and now, the worse news : the social audit, done by the government, indicates that a good percentage of the 5 lakh who were provided work don’t exist. ngos, the media and others think it’s much more than a good percentage. a tenth of the amount spent might have been eaten away by leakage, according to the audit. again, ngos, the media and ..others estimate around 30-60% might have been siphoned away.

the news report, i referred to earlier, says around 25% of all job cards issued in the country were distributed in andhra pradesh. the performance of the scheme in the state is thus a fair indicator of the implementation of the scheme in the entire country. let’s look at how and where the scheme developed holes – half the project ideas were supposed to come from the district adminstrations..the panchayats were entitled to decide how the other half would be spent. at the district level, the local minister, mp, mlas, the elected officials of the zilla parishad teamed up with a ring of officials in the adminstration . lower down, similar syndicates were formed at the block level and so on. most of the panchayats evinced little interest in the scheme and sent no proposals to the project officers- and where the village level elected officials did evince interest…they took great care to see that the villagers were kept in the dark about their proposals.

i said ministers, mps were involved – but i am not implying they were interested in the pickings. too small for some of them, i guess. the scheme provides a good opportunity for them to extend largesse/patronage to their supporters. the rings, composed of elected officials and babus would decide the projects..and evolve the mechanism to execute the projects and distribute the spoils..taking care, all along to see that people’s involvement is kept to the minimum. a mandal (block in andhra pradesh) official i talked to gave me a rough picture. a canal was to be strengthened in a village in nalgonda district – bogus estimates were drawn up for 40 lakhs. the work was assigned to a contractor (there’d be no contractor on the records)..it was completed at a cost of 10 lakhs. the babus, the mla, the mandal elected officials pocketed the rest. the villagers haven’t heard, don’t know of the work..or the canal..or the scheme.

everytime one is afforded a closer look at how some of these schemes/scams actually work..one can’t help but admire the sheer ingenuity of those involved. and their confidence. one ring in a village in anantapur district, where the scheme was inaugurated by the prime minister, obtained job cards for a large number of the villagers..opened savings accounts in their names in, not the  post office in the village (through which the payments are to be made)..but one in a neighbouring village and created ‘work’ in the village..and made the workers ‘payments’, which of course they never recieved. again, the villagers weren’t even aware that job cards had been issued in their names. in another district, most of the state away, in a vizianagaram village, workers were engaged to fill in a tank..they had actually dug up just a year ago (for the food-for-work programme). nothing wrong with that, right? just what keynes would have ordered. except the number of workers engaged was much less than what was recorded on the rolls..and all of them had voted for the congress party. and congress party leaders pocketed most of the money meant for the missing workers. i’d speculated on my blog that the job cards..would be a handy asset for some ignorant villagers to pawn in return for quick money. reality is more colourful than speculative fiction – a new class of enterprising businessmen have sprung up in many villages who promise people work, help them get job cards..collect the cards and pay them small amounts. with the promise that they’re working at..getting them work, soon. workers who get paid much less than what they’re supposed to be paid (30 rs a day in one village) because they’re ‘hired’ by contractors who don’t have any role in the scheme in the first place, postmasters who hoard job cards and block payments, temporary field and technical staff who work hard to earn some long-term savings..i’ll stop my litany here and wait for the large india-whining team of ex-bureaucrats, crusading journalists, selfless politicians to start finding, telling us of more ways to make the scheme more ‘foolproof, transparent and accountable’to help me dredge up whatever indignation (not totally aroused by these all-too-familiar tales of graft) is still stuck in my throat. 

potential applicants in andhra pradesh would number 3 times more than those who have actually applied for job cards. the rest of the states recorded even lower figures. the money spent was less than a tenth of the money allotted in andhra pradesh. given the poor enrolment in the other states i don’t think the figure would be significantly different in the rest of the country. these are still early days – and no official figures have actuallly come out. i am sure the government and the powers behind the throne would find enough ways to make the figures seem more interesting.

but: i’d argued on my blog earlier, if we have to have these pro-poor schemes, that direct transfer of money to beneficiaries would always work better than ’smart, elaborate’ schemes. and i think a better way to make this scheme work is to commandeer a large transport plane, load all the money budgeted for the scheme in it, give aruna roy and jean dreze and a few other likeminded, kindhearted souls a free ride..and get them to strew the money around the countryside. i’m quite sure more than 10 % of the poor would benefit from such an exercise.

(i thank shivam for inviting me to blog here as a guest).

Am not going for the BlogCamp, are you?

No regrets. Am going for what you may call a ‘paid vacation’ to Lansdowne, Pauri, Almora and Jageshwar for a travel guide. I chose locations where I won’t have to walk up-hill for kilometeters. (“Why can’t you walk, you besan ka laddu?” said the supercool editor. Supercool because she reads this blog!)

But there are no free lunches: I’ll have to strut around with a diary and pen, like a tax inspector, asking hotel managers such things as their occupancy rates. But that should be fun too, in quite another way.