National Rural Employment Gurantee Programme (NREGA) West Bengal, India:Study of Two Villages

Abstract

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has potential to provide livelihood security in the short and long run. The scheme in the short run can provide wage employment to rural people who are mainly unskilled manual workers. It can also provide them the alternative to migrating to more urban areas in search of livelihood, during the periods of unemployment. In the long run, the assets created in the scheme can generate localized employment opportunities. It has potential to improve the environment, which has been degraded due to over exploitation, empower marginalized sections of the society by providing them economic independence, and encourage more people to play active role in governance. But, as reports are coming out on the implementation of the programme, it becomes evident that all these potential might not be realized at all if proper care is not taken. One of the concerns in this regard is that the effective implementation depends overwhelmingly on human beings. On one hand, there could be corrupt and manipulative implementing human agencies on the other hand the people for whom the scheme is planned might not able to curb this evil. Answer to this problem lies within the Act itself, where it was mentioned that the Right To Information Act is to be applied proactively. There are several concerns that arise from the scheme, and require attention. One of such is the issue of sufficiency of the wage. The amount of wage, provided in the scheme becomes less effective to generate sustainable livelihood for larger families. The main reason for this is that the guarantee of 100 days of employment is for the household and not for individuals. So, as the number of household members along with dependents increases, the amount would be sufficient for a less than 3 months to sustain a family. Therefore, we can say that it is useful for small families, but for large families it does not seem to provide much effective out come.The following are the major observations of the study, which was conducted in two gram Panchayats, from two different districts in West Bengal. The districts were South Dinajpur(high poverty) and Murshidabad (less poverty). These districts have economic achievements that are very different from each other. The idea was to study the difference in the demand and implementation of such a scheme in an economically worse of and a better off regions. It should be mentioned once again that active participation on the part of the population is the key to effective implementation of the scheme. Though in the study it was found that the scheme was being implemented more or less fairly in the two GPs of the two districts in West Bengal, it is limited by small geographical boundary and does not necessarily represent the overall implementation in the state or the country. The Act seems to assume too many things like people would be aware of the scheme and start demanding work, they could be proactively involved in social auditing, knowing the right information would be costless in terms of time and money and the implementing agency would also play a proactive role. But one should take into consideration the fact that this approach is a completely different one from the previous approaches. People cannot start suddenly to behave as they are expected to be, because they are not used to it. They can start participating actively in planning and decision making process all of a sudden. All these along with the social awareness would come gradually. It was evident from the study that the respondents were not actively participating in the process, neither they were aware of their legal rights nor about their responsibilities. To ensure the implementation of the scheme in a broader context, awareness about legal entitlements and active participation from the people would play the crucial role. Lastly, an economically better-off place like Murshidabad with support from other sources of income (like Bidi Making) may derive less benefit from this scheme. Whereas, an economically worse-off place may find it more useful in terms of employment and sufficiency of wages. Therefore resource mobility to the needy places would address the question of regional disparity in an effective way.