In the shadow of Maoism

MGNREGA status report

In the shadow of Maoism

With many analysts believing that social development and progress can wean tribals away from the Maoist fold, the govt’s flagship rural jobs guarantee programme’s success here could be critical to the country’s future

Liz Mathew

Dantewada, Chhattisgarh: Madvi Madka owns 4ha of land in Chingavaram in the Sukum block in central India. The district in which the block is located has become infamous after 6 April, killing of 76 policemen by the Maoists. This is the ground zero of the war between the Indian state and the Maoists, and Madka, who owns 4ha of land—often left fallow because there wasn’t enough water for irrigation—here used to make ends meet by travelling to neighbouring Andhra Pradesh and picking chillies during the harvest season.

That changed with the introduction of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). Field workers in charge of implementing the job guarantee programme in the Naxal-infested region expanded the scope of projects that fell under the scheme to ponds on private lands—a move targeted at generating goodwill. Madka was one of the beneficiaries and a small pond was constructed on his land.

The pond and a little more help from field workers have changed Madka’s life. He now has a vegetable garden, a fish pond, and owns some goats and chicken. Madka has become a role model for other tribals; “many people in the area have approached us for ponds”, says Dinesh Chandel, assistant project officer of MGNREGS in Dantewada district.

The success of such initiatives lends credence to the local administration’s belief that social development, more than mere counter-insurgency, can dent the Maoists hold over tribals. It would appear that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s flagship programme, MGNREGS is helping the administration regain the trust of tribals. This isn’t the intended objective of the scheme, but here in Dantewada, anything that can help ideologically counter the Maoists is welcome.

Empowering locals: (From top) Villagers of Kasoli working on a project under the rural employment guarantee programme; a recently constructed check dam in Badepaneda village in Geedam block; a boy in Dantewada district collecting mahua flowers which are used to produce an alcoholic drink.

A ray of hope

MGNREGS plays a very basic role in Dantewada, says Prasanna R., district collector, Bijapur. “It has helped the locals to develop confidence in the administration. It is easy us for to take other schemes to them,” he adds. Bijapur is one of the districts worst affected by Maoist insurgency.

Recognizing the benefits of the scheme, the state is working towards creating infrastructure that can help MGNREGS projects get off the ground.

Some tribals view the official measures favourably. Chetra Atami, a tribal in Kasoli, says: “We need more bridges and check dams so that we can do more farming in the land. We are happy that we get work when we want. The administration does not deny us funds at all.”

“We are happy that we can work under the scheme. It provides us a steady income and we do not have to go searching for work off season,” adds Bhimsen, a resident in the Kasoli camp, where around 200 families have been shifted from their villages in the forest after being forced to leave homes by the Naxals.

Yet, operating in a region where the Maoists call the shots in most areas comes with its own set of problems.

It is routine for government officials to be kidnapped and held hostage. Many districts do not have enough banks and post offices. For example, Dantewada (17,634 sq. km area and around 770,000 population) has 45 banks and 130 post offices in its 403 villages, out of which almost 50% are not functional.

“We do have problems in meeting the target, especially in the interiors. Payment is another area of trouble, with not many post offices or banks to transfer the money. We also face a human resource crunch,” says Alex Menon, chief executive officer, zilla panchayat (district council), Bijapur.

“With one village getting at least (a) Rs10 lakh project, many post offices do not have the staff to handle it nor are they comfortable in handling the money,” adds Chandel.

So far the district administration has opened 37,280 bank accounts and 84,052 post office accounts for the villagers, while 13,433 families have been distributed job cards. At least 2,248 projects have already been cleared; and of the Rs61.78 crore approved, Rs26.55 crore has been spent.

It isn’t always easy to interest tribals in the projects, says Chandel. Some of them prefer to harvest mahua flowers (which is distilled to make a liquor called Mahua) and tendu leaves (a major non-timber forest produce used for rolling beedis), instead. However, with the benefits of some MGNREGS projects becoming evident, the administration hopes there will be more interest.

Benefits for all

One such project is the check dam in Badepaneda village in Geedam block. Built at a cost of Rs47 lakh (it took three years and 5,350 man hours), this can store water for at least eight villages. “Earlier, we used to face water shortage in summer, right from the month of February. With this check dam, we will not have any water problem throughout the year. Our wells (in the nearby areas) are not dry; we can bathe lavishly and irrigate our farms too,” says Devashish, a villager.

According to M. Mahapatra, block medical officer, Community Health Centre in Behramgarh, Bijapur, health awareness among the villagers has improved too. While there may be no correlation between this and the job guarantee scheme, MGNREGS does help the administration reach out to people and may help it familiarize them with other state-sponsored schemes and benefits. Mahapatra attends to at least 13-14 deliveries in a month and the laboratory attached to the centre conducts 400-500 blood tests in the same period. “Vaccinations have become more regular also,” he said.

The job guarantee scheme has also helped local officials reach out to areas where they did not have a presence. Like Bijapur zilla panchayat, where most of the 36 villages were inaccessible till recently.

An important benefit, according to Menon and Prasanna, is that through MGNREGS the administration could regain at least 10% of the land from the Naxals in a year. “Reddy village (20km from the district headquarters) is the perfect example for rehabilitation. It was unreachable, schools and health centres had been blasted by the Naxals. Now the villagers have gone back from the camps. They have two schools and health centres there,” Menon said.

Still, in this part of the country, MGNREGS is far from an unqualified success. In Matwara village, 357 job cards were distributed, but only 150 people have worked and earned wages. As a result, the ambit of the scheme has not yet expanded from creating small ponds and approach roads.

While it is in the interests of the local administration to implement the job guarantee scheme, the Maoists, villagers claim, themselves do not seem opposed to it—as long as a project doesn’t pose a threat to them.

“In some places, they ensure that the villagers get the ensured wage and in some other places, they themselves supervise the construction of roads. But they do oppose it when we try to construct roads to get access to their heartlands,” says an MGNREGS field worker in Bijapur district.

Political will, NGOs hold key to success

MGNREGA status report

Political will, NGOs hold key to success

Bundelkhand is one of the most backward regions in the country. Yet, even here, there are huge disparities between villages where MGNREGA has been implemented in its true spirit and those where it hasn’t

Liz Mathew

Jhansi (Bundelkhand), Uttar Pradesh: Nahrani, a 38-year-old in Lalitpur, a village 30km from Jhansi, has an all-too-familiar tale to tell: a recently deceased husband; the lack of a ration card which promises access to free or inexpensive food; and a village without water, power, schools or health centres.

Not one child from the 50-odd families in this village goes to school. The menfolk are perennially drifting, looking for jobs. And no one has heard of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

Merely 15km from Lalitpur, another village in Bundelkhand, Ghisoli, presents a study in contrast.

All children from the 400-odd families in this village go to school, and some even nurse dreams of college. The village itself looks clean and prosperous. Behind this success are 26 self-help groups, each with 13 members, set up by local women with help from a non-governmental organization (NGO). And everyone at Ghisoli has heard of MGNREGA—in fact, jobs provided by the scheme help the women set aside money for the self-help groups, which have together set aside a little over Rs1 lakh in a local bank.

That’s a significant achievement for women, especially in Bundelkhand.

Patchy implementation

Spanning seven districts in Uttar Pradesh and six in Madhya Pradesh, this was once among the most prosperous regions in the country, but today it is one of the most backward. Prolonged drought, low industrial growth, rampant poverty and the apathy of the administration have forced people to migrate. Eight out of every 10 men in the region are out working or searching for work elsewhere. The women, despite running households in the absence of men, are not the dominant sex in this region where communities are still structured along feudal lines and caste, with lower-caste women at the bottom.

In many ways, this is just the kind of environment where MGNREGS was supposed to make a difference. It has, in the rare village such as Ghisoli, but across Bundelkhand the story of the populist job guarantee scheme is one of corruption and lack of awareness.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party may have rubbished Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi’s allegations that the state government isn’t properly utilizing MGNREGS funds, but most villagers in Jhansi district do admit that there has been rampant corruption in the implementation of the scheme.

“MGNREGA is a programme out of which the poor in every part of the country get benefits. But in this state, the system is made in such a way that nobody gets the advantages,” says Amit Tripathy, a local social activist.

Tripathy is convinced there is a larger motive behind this.

“The officials and the people who matter think that proper implementation of such programmes would make the people strong enough to weaken them,” he says.

Tripathy’s claim is supported by villagers and anecdotal evidence.

It is opposed by data.

In Jhansi district (population is 1.9 million), 133,497 job cards under the job guarantee scheme have been distributed and 86,178 people have already benefited, according to the latest data in the ministry of rural development. Of the total of Rs142.14 crore allotted to the scheme in the district, Rs105.92 has been spent, translating into a 75% utilization, better than the national average of 71% for the 619 districts where the scheme has been implemented.

Yet, nothing is visible on the ground.

Villagers complain that powerful and influential village headmen, in connivance with the officials, shoo them away when approach for work under the scheme. The jobs often go to cronies of the headmen, they say. And when the rare job is proffered to someone who really needs it, the headmen invariably cheat them out of the money that is their due, the villagers allege. Even the job cards aren’t registered in their names, they say. And the money, for those lucky ones who manage to land some work, always comes late.

“They (panchayat council members) chase us away with sticks when we go to them (asking) for work. They will keep our cards and provide jobs to their people. They do not give women jobs,” says Biniya, who runs a small paan stall in Bagora village in Babina block. She doesn’t see any point in complaining.

“If we have to complain against these people, we will have to go to Jhansi, and that too several times. We will have to spend Rs100 each every time. What’s the point,” adds a visibly frustrated Biniya.

Baghora, in many ways, is a mirror image of Lalitpur. The roads are bad. Most houses don’t have power and water connections. “At the school we have, teachers come once in a week. Our children do not get the mid-day meal because those who run the school share it among themselves,” complains Ramesh, another villager.

The state government official in charge of MGNREGS in the village, Mahesh Shukla refutes all charges regarding the scheme. It works perfectly, he says and adds, “In 2009-10, we gave Rs7.9 lakh for labour and Rs7 lakh for materials. Around 350 job cards were distributed in this village and 175 people have already worked under the scheme.”

The real problem facing the scheme, Shukla adds, is entirely different. “Actually, there is dearth of labourers,” he says.

But he does concede that payments are delayed.

The real problem in many parts of Bundelkhand would appear to be lack of awareness. In Mota, another village in the region, people have not heard about any government schemes for people below the poverty line; and no villager has a ration card or job card. The only card most people possess is a voter identity card; politicians want people to vote. So, what explains Ghisoli’s success?

An exception to the rule

At one level, the success of the scheme and its impact on Ghisoli point to the difference self-help groups can make to the job guarantee scheme.

At another, it points to the difference political intervention by a popular leader can make.

In Ghisoli’s case, that leader is Rahul Gandhi. The son of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and general secretary of the party, he visited Ghisoli in 2008. The village wasn’t very different from many others in the region then, and villagers complained to him about the non-implementation of MGNREGS.

Soon after, the Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojna (RGMVP), an NGO that works to create self-help groups entered the region. RGMVP is headquartered in Rae Bareli, the pocket borough of the Gandhi family whose representative in the Lok Sabha is Sonia Gandhi.

RGMVP’s volunteers worked with the village women, even taking some to Andhra Pradesh, a state that has been transformed by the success of self-help groups. “We found women were running dhabas there,” says Jayanti, a villager, adding that this led to the natural question: Why can’t we?

The self-help groups also helped the women ask for and get work under MGNREGS. “We were used to be thrown out by the village council people whenever we approached them for work. We were shy and reluctant to push ourselves. But now we are aware of our rights and we will fight for it,” says Vimla, a villager.

The women started setting aside Rs50 a month as their contribution to their respective self-help group. Today, the self-help groups run a bank of foodgrain; the bank has a quintal or 100kg, and 20kg from this can be loaned to the needy when required. The self-help groups can also lend up to Rs10,000. The women have managed to convince the police to shut down wine shops in the village, and are now planning ahead. “We have been promised (by RGMVP) that our children will be given special education in English and computers next year,” says Vimla.

Other NGOs, working in other villages in the region, have made a similar difference—empowering women and improving lives.

In Chapra village, Magleshwar Yadav, a teacher in the Chapra girls primary school, says that not a single student had dropped out in the past two years—this, in a region where most girl students drop out of school.

And no one from the village has gone out seeking jobs, says Sumalata, another villager.

Yet, such villages are few. At least 30-40% of people in the region still migrate in search of jobs, says Manish Jain of Jagruti Nehru Yuva Mandal, an NGO.

That’s evident in Mota village, which seems populated by old men and women. And in Nayibanti, another village in Bundelkhand, 100 families migrated recently in search of jobs.

“This village is just 2km from the Babina block headquarters,” says Shahid, a social activist. “If officials can’t implement the job guarantee scheme there, one can imagine the plight of faraway villages.”