| Sreelatha Menon: When delayed wages mean more wages | |
| 174 workers in Jharkhand’s Khunti district received Rs 2.61 lakh as compensation | | Sreelatha Menon / New Delhi June 21, 2009, 0:16 IST | |
Probably for the first time under the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, 174 workers in Jharkhand’s Khunti district received Rs 2.61 lakh as compensation.
Teachers have a knack of getting people to listen to them. In the case of government officials in Khunti district of Jharkhand, they had a tough time last month when economist and teacher Jean Dreze led some teachers and students to do a Rozgar Adhikar Abhiyan, or an employment rights awareness campaign, in the district. The purpose was not to carry out another survey, but to make corrections or force the government to make corrections wherever the team found anything amiss.
The main purpose was to activate the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in the district.
There was hardly any NREGA work in either Khunti or Murhu blocks. Wages were still due for work done months (sometimes years) ago.
As part of the campaign, a team of students from Delhi and other universities had surveyed 10 gram panchayats of Khunti and Murhu blocks last month. They found more than 30 worksites where payments were due. These include worksites in Jikki village (Siladon GP) and Chikor village (Bhandra GP) where more than 50 workers have not been paid for work done two years ago.
On May 11, the team submitted its findings to the competent authorities, who promised payments by May 18. When this was not done, the teacher-cum-activists met the authorities again, who asked for two more days.
“After delaying wage payments of thousands of workers in the district for over two years in some cases, the district administration seems to think that it can make the pending payments in two days without changing its style of working,” the teachers said. But their efforts did not go in vain. They had asked for a payment of Rs 1,500 as compensation to every person under the Payment of Wages Act, 1936.
It was paid probably for the first time in the history of the Act. The beneficiaries were over 174 workers in Khunti block, who shared among them Rs 2.61 lakh, thanks to the intervention of the teachers and students.
The next stop for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP) activists would be the Vijaypura gram panchayat in Rajasthan, where the panchayat is hosting a grand NREGP mela.
The mela is a constitutional provision under the NREGP Act and is meant to spread awareness. It would bring together administrators, political heads and workers from the villages, says Shankar Singh of the Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Samiti, which is also a co-organiser of the mela.
The mela would be an occasion for the host panchayat to display its achievements in terms of works done in a year under NREGP and the wages paid in each of its villages.
These melas and abhiyans are currently rare. This is reflected in the low average number of work days on every job card. According to a 2008 survey by the team led by Dreze, in 2008, Bihar workers got a mere 23 days, Chhattisgarh 30 days, Jharkhand 44 days and Uttar Pradesh 26 days.
If the number of workers who completed 100 days of work were to be examined, it is even smaller. According to the same survey, the number of workers who completed 100 days was 2 per cent in Bihar, 1 per cent in Chhattisgarh, 9 per cent in Jharkhand, 19 per cent in Madhya Pradesh and 4 per cent in UP. Many more teachers and academicians would probably need to come down to the field with their students to take these numbers up.
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