FIFTY-odd years ago when our newly independent republic adopted its constitution, the state was asked to make it one of its directive principles to provide gainful employment to every able-bodied citizen. Some sixteen years ago, VP Singh came to power promising to make ‘right to work’ a constitutionally guaranteed fundamental right of every Indian. That was the first and last time the ruling elite in this country flirted with this slogan. Now the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre has come up with a highly diluted National Rural Employment Guarantee Act that promises potential annual employment worth Rs. 6,000 to every rural family. The scheme would initially be operational in only 200 districts of the country and then extended over the next five years to all the 600 districts.
The proposed Act has already had a trial run in the form of the ongoing food for work scheme, currently in force in 150 backward districts of the country. This scheme has evoked wide criticism because it is highly restricted and offers no real guarantee on the ground. Its coverage has been restricted to only BPL families and that too only in 150 districts, and there is no guarantee of minimum wages or assured unemployment allowances in the event of work not being provided to a job seeker. Worse, field reports suggest that it most cases the scheme has been subverted, with the balance tilting in favour of contractors and tractors as opposed to the men and women who are desperately seeking some employment to survive. The nexus of contractors, corrupt officials and dealers has translated the scheme as a food-for-loot package, while for the labouring men and women it has been little more than starvation-for-work.
How does the proposed NREGA take care of these criticisms? The coverage has been raised from 150 to 200 districts with a promise to extend it to the entire country over the next five years and every rural family has potentially been brought within the purview of the scheme. But in place of minimum wage, the draft NREGA promises a fixed daily wage of Rs. 60 which is way below the stipulated minimum wage in many states. Thus in the name of empowering the common man and honouring the common minimum programme, the UPA government seeks to use the NREGA as an instrument to depress the wage level across the country. Worse still, if irregularities are detected in implementation, the upshot would be an immediate suspension of the scheme in the concerned region, a clause that effectively provides the corrupt with yet another lever to force the poor into submission and silence.
The Congress fondly believes that the NREGA would serve as the ultimate ‘human face’ (read mask) for the government’s elitist economic agenda and would power another major revival of the Congress as the ‘garibi hataao’ slogan had done in the early 1970s. The party also hopes to silence all the critics and opponents of its economic agenda with this one single legislation. The high voltage publicity campaign surrounding the NREGA is a well calculated part of this political strategy. The people’s movement for securing the right to work as a constitutionally guaranteed fundamental right must see through this political game plan. We must use this legislation as a tool or platform for effecting a broader and more vigorous mobilization and assertion of the rural poor and the unemployed youth for their basic rights while relentlessly exposing the limitation and dilution inherent in the legislation and intensifying the movement against the overall agenda of neo-liberal economic reforms.
Interestingly, the tabling of the NREGA bill in the Lok Sabha coincided with the current World Bank President’s maiden visit to India. Paul Wolfowitz, the hated American hawk who has played a key role in scripting Bush’s worldwide war and the so-called Project for a New American Century that seeks unchallenged and unilateral US domination over the entire world, has now been made World Bank President to carry on the job in other ways. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chose the occasion to seek more funds from the World Bank to implement the UPA’s ambitious ‘Bharat Nirman’ agenda. Starvation wages for the poor, royalty and interest payments to the MNCs and their global benefactor, the Fund-Bank establishment. That’s Manmohanomics in action, for the aam aadmi! q