A recent amendment to the NREGA includes working on small and marginal farms as permitted activities under the scheme. But there also remains a lot to be done in the sphere of providing public goods in Indian villages. The most important public good that needs urgent attention is rural sanitation. This should be on the top of the priority list of the NREGA. Not only will this fill part of the gap in the rural health policy, the NREGA is better suited for this work than the myriad Central government schemes that have tried to address this issue.

India accounts for about 25 per cent of the world’s child deaths. Among the most important causes in India is diarrhoea. In 2006, 33 per cent of Indian children under the age of 5 received treatment for diarrhoea. The disease needs to be addressed by improvements in sanitation. UNICEF says that easy measures like sanitation can prevent 90 per cent of diarrhoea deaths. However, India’s rural sanitation programme has not been successful. In 2006, only 18 per cent of the country’s rural population had access to sanitation.

One of the main reasons for the failure of rural sanitation schemes has been an attempt to implement schemes designed at the Centre or in state capitals which do not take account local conditions. The one-size-fits-all approach, such as, when subsidies are given for construction of facilities by BPL families, has not resulted in increased usage or improvements in outcomes measured by health status. For example, there are instances of centralised schemes which privileged the importance of sanitation and built septic tanks and latrines, but these were never utilised, as the community was not involved in the decision-making process.

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