After the intense conversations and debates around the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in 2005, there is an alarming silence about it in the public domain. This should worry everybody who had hoped that the initiative represented a paradigm shift in the government’s approach to social welfare. It could, possibly, be a reflection of the complexity of translating a programme that guarantees the “legal right of a hundred days of wage employment” into a framework for transforming lives. It, most certainly, mirrors our tendency to move to the next big thing without as much as a backward glance. Yet, if there is one big message out of the 200 districts that came under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) early this year, it is this: don’t take your eye off the ball.

The National Advisory Council (NAC) to the UPA government, when it had envisaged this ambitious social intervention, was aware of the infirmities inherent in earlier job guarantee schemes. It listed 13 fatal flaws that had undermined earlier initiatives: lack of awareness among local communities about its existence, lack of community participation, lack of planning, sub-standard quality of assets created, false muster rolls, problems of payments, contractors persisted with, diversion of funds, weak monitoring and verification systems, no comprehensive data base, inadequate capacity of implementing agencies, multiple wage programmes running in parallel, no public accountability.

The NAC hoped to overcome these fatal flaws by ensuring that the NREGS gives work on demand, that no contractor is recruited for carrying out the works, that payment would be made on every seventh day, that muster rolls would be maintained on the work site itself, and that a social audit would be carried out with the involvement of the local people to ensure accountability. So far the NREGS appears to have been successful in avoiding only two of 13 listed flaws. From all evidence, contractors have been kept away from these sites and there has been a streamlining of the job guarantee programmes on offer — it is the NREGS that has emerged the flagship project in these 200 districts. As for the other flaws highlighted by the NAC, they are both ubiquitous and persistent, despite the extraordinary attention paid to the Scheme by those at the highest echelon of government.

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