'A work guarantee that can be switched off at will is no guarantee at all.'
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) scheme is dead.
In its place, a new rural employment guarantee law, the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin), VB G RAM G, Bill, 2025 is created.
Yes, Ram has replaced Mahatma Gandhi!
Not just the name, the power the gram panchayats had to allocate work in response to the demands from workers has been taken away.
Now the Centre has the power to decide in which region or area it wants to allocate work, and how much funds a state should get.
It means while the decision-making is with the central government, the financial burden has been passed on to the states.
"Under the new scheme, workers will be at the mercy of the central government at every step," the well known economist, social scientist and activist Jean Dreze tells Rediff's Shobha Warrier.
Was there a need to revamp the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act? Was it not helping the rural unemployed?
It surely was, despite serious implementation problems.
A revamp would be good, but this is not a revamp, it's a repeal.
The VB-G RAM G Bill repeals MGNREGA under Section 37 and replaces it with a centrally-sponsored scheme at the discretion of the central government.
This discretion undermines the entire idea of work on demand as a legal right. And the new scheme is bereft of provisions that might help to address the implementation problems.
Incidentally, it is not just MGNREGA, the Act, that gets repealed under the Bill.
Section 37 also repeals 'all rules, notifications, Schemes, orders and guidelines made thereunder'.
In short, the VB-G RAM G Bill makes a clean sweep of the entire edifice of MGNREGA, from the moment the new scheme is notified.
Under the new scheme, while the central government continues to have the power to decide where and when the work will be, the state governments have to bear 40% of the cost. Will any state accept this kind of an arrangement?
You are raising two separate issues. One is the discretion of the central government to decide where and when the new scheme comes into force.
This is what we call the 'switch-off clause'.
It defeats the purpose of employment guarantee.
The new scheme is like a work guarantee without any guarantee that the guarantee will come into effect.
The other issue is cost-sharing.
It works as follows. Under the new scheme, the central government sets a so-called 'normative allocation' for each state.
These allocations are supposed to be based on objective criteria, but needless to say, the central government gets to set the criteria.
Within these allocations, there will be 60/40 cost-sharing between Centre and state. Beyond that, the states have to pay 100% of the costs.
The poorer states will find it hard to contribute 40%, let alone 100% if they wish to go beyond the normative allocations.
So, the Bill makes states liable for providing employment without any guarantee of adequate funding.
Many of them are likely to start regarding the scheme as a burden rather than an opportunity.
MGNREGA, by contrast, was a great opportunity for states to do some good work with assured funding.
Can you call it a centrally sponsored scheme when the central government's contribution is only 60%?
I don't think that's unusual. What is objectionable is the reduction of a legal entitlement to a discretionary scheme.
Which is more shocking, removing Mahatma Gandhi's name from the scheme or the the central government's decision to retain all powers for this scheme with no accountability?
The latter.
The change of name is a distraction. But even the change of name is objectionable.
MGNREGA was always meant to be a national programme beyond party lines.
The new name gives it a partisan ring.
From what you have seen, how did the previous scheme help people?
MGNREGA has multiple benefits.
It protects people from poverty, reduces distress migration, contributes to social equity, creates productive assets, helps to safeguard the environment, and so on.
Many of these benefits are well documented.
Of course, some of them have been reduced by implementation issues.
But the new Bill does nothing to resolve these issues.
In fact, it makes it more difficult to resolve them by demotivating the state governments and disempowering the workers.
You said the poorer states will find it very hard to contribute 40%. The TDP, which is part of the NDA, has stated that the 40% contribution by states would increase the burden on the state government.
Do you think the end result will be the poorer states rejecting the scheme altogether?
I don't think that they will reject the scheme, but they will go slow on sanctioning projects.
Right now, states easily sanction MGNREGA projects, because 90% of the costs are borne by the central government.
Under the new scheme, the states will think twice each time they sanction a project.
Also, there are likely to be long delays in wage payments in the poorer states.
Payment delays have already done enormous harm to MGNREGA, the problem may well get much worse under the new scheme.
A Congress MP from Kerala said that the draft legislation was anti-women, as in states like Kerala, women constitute 90% of the MGNREGA workforce. Do you feel women workers will be affected more all over India?
Certainly. Unlike men, most women in rural India have few opportunities to earn their own income, other than MGNREGA.
That is why the proportion of women among MGNREGA workers is so high -- close to 90% in Kerala and 60% or so in India as a whole.
If employment levels decline under the new scheme, as is likely to happen, women will be the main victims because they have few alternatives.
Does the new law not guarantee employment at all? Is that the major difference between the new law and MGNREGA?
I would say that it is one major difference, and possibly the most important difference.
Just to clarify, there is some sort of conditional guarantee in the new scheme, in the sense that workers can claim employment if the scheme is notified in their area.
But a conditional guarantee is not a full-fledged guarantee.
Furthermore, even a conditional guarantee requires an assurance of adequate funding as and when workers demand employment. This assurance existed under MGNREGA, but it is much weaker under the new scheme.
In other ways, too, the new scheme affects workers' ability to claim their right to work.
For one thing, they will be at the mercy of the central government at every step.
A legal right has little value without effective means to realise it.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff