Govt’s anti-poor policies

Kashmir Times. Dated: 10/16/2014 2:35:43 PM

Ill-conceived proposal to tamper with MGNREGA will add to the obnoxious figures of hunger and poverty

Union Rural Development Minister’s reported move to tweak the 100 day rural job scheme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is disturbing as it will have a wide ranging impact in the rural areas on the lives of the poor people dependent on this scheme for employment. The proposal to dilute the MGNREGA is inspired by several stories of irregularities and to this extent rural development minister Nitin Gadkari had recently suggested the same on the floor of the Lok Sabha. It is nothing but bizarre to stall a scheme that has been a boon for the rural poor solely because the government cannot put in place mechanisms to plug corruption. Some reports have suggested that a change in NREGA has been proposed following the alleged inability of implementing agencies to create durable and productive assets because of constraints the ratio imposed on expenditure on the material component. However, if the ratio of material component is increased, it will have an adverse impact on the wages which will fall drastically. Economists, alarmed by the proposed move, have warned that this would result in total employment coming down to 136 crore persondays per year from 220 crore persondays. According to the assessments of the rural development ministry officials, this move to dilute the decade old policy that has made substantial difference to the lives of many rural poor including the socially oppressed, would immediately impact five crore rural families. In an obvious bid to rob the scheme of its labour intensive nature, Gadkari’s plan is to change the scheme’s labour-material ratio from 60:40 to 51:49. And this is being done not only by seizing the executive power to undo a law that came about democratically with the unanimous backing of all political formations but also by over-ruling all departmental and expert objections to the same. Far from bringing any proposed amendments to the law in the public domain for debate, Gadkari is shockingly learnt to have struck down even the vital objections raised by officials within his ministry without even a discussion or without being dictated by any sense of logic. In a note to the proposed changes, the officials had said that “though the move was legally and technically possible to change the ratio, but added that it runs contrary to the spirit of the act”. That the scheme has been unable to create assets cannot be used to dilute it as there is no evidence that by robbing the poor of their right to employment, the government can raise the productivity of the scheme. Gadkari’s assurance that the proposed changes will not adversely impact the lives of the rural poor is a farce as a probable cut in the wages of those seeking employment under this scheme cannot be wished away without allocating massive additional funds to maintain a balance between peaking up material costs and its labour intensive component. That is neither in the plan, nor pragmatic. The proposal seeks to restrict the scheme to the least prosperous districts of the country. This calculation is based on the fallacious belief that prosperity in this country is equitably divided.
The clear import of the ill-conceived proposal is that it seeks to benefit the class of contractors at the cost of the miseries of the poor. What this means at the end of the day is that BJP government’s policies, aimed at increase in economic growth purely through industrialization and inviting massive foreign investment, are anti-poor. This has earlier been demonstrated amply through its bid to water down the Food Security Act and the Land Acquisition Act that would not only adversely impact the farmers but also the agriculture sector. Its agenda of development is myopic and neither based on a model of sustainability nor inclusiveness, measures that are only spoken of as slogans. By vandalizing or brutally discarding schemes related to the social sector in a country where the teeming millions are reeling under poverty, whether BJP succeeds in clinching the admirable figures of growth or not, it will certainly end up multiplying the figures of hunger and poverty.

 

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