As someone who said from day one that it would fail as similar schemes had failed in the past, I felt sadly vindicated when this newspaper reported last week that it has failed miserably. An audit by the Comptroller & Auditor General (CAG) reveals that just 3.2 per cent of registered needy households in 200 of India’s poorest districts managed to get the guaranteed 100 days of work a year. The average employment the grandiose, very expensive scheme succeeded in providing was 18 days per needy household a year. The only achievement of the scheme has been to keep the desperately poor as desperately poor as ever at huge expense to the Indian taxpayer.

Will this make our profligate policy makers realise that the way forward is empowerment and not charity? Unlikely. The scheme is the Congress president’s only contribution to economic thought, so who would dare oppose it? Her son and heir announced shortly after becoming party general secretary that he wanted the scheme extended to every district in India. It will be and the poor will continue to remain poor because even if the promised hundred days of work are provided it works out to just over Rs 16 a day. Beggars in Mumbai and Delhi make more.

In the hope that there is someone up there listening, may I make a humble suggestion. Now that the CAG has declared it a failure the best way forward is for the scheme to be scrapped and replaced by smaller, more localised schemes that involve some skills training. India is desperately in need of masons, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, mechanics and other skilled workers required for the massive construction boom that has only just begun. If the government is serious about lifting people out of poverty and giving them half a chance at a better life then we have to move from charity to empowerment. There is no other way.

... contd.