Heads roll in NREGA job council, Aiyar, Nikhil De in new list

The Central Employment Guarantee Council (CEGC), a statutory body under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) which is supposed to have at least one meeting every six months, will finally meet this week after a gap of nine months, with many new faces.

The Council had announced a list of members before the exit of former rural development minister C P Joshi last year, but it was not notified. Now, the ministry under Vilasrao Deksmukh has modified the list and new members have been included and many old members have been left out.

Joshi had kept the Council largely the same with removal of one or two persons like National Advisory Council members Aruna Roy and Jean Dreze who had completed their terms.

But the present minister has removed several more members and the council is waiting to be notified. CEGC was not convened even once this year though the peak work season of NREGA is over.

The new council has new faces like Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan leader Nikhil De, a veteran activist and an associate of Roy, tribal rights activist Pradeep Prabhu, and political figures like Mani Shankar Aiyar, Sandeep Dikshit and Narayan Singh, besides senior political leaders like Bhakta Charan Das.

Says Gopal, a veteran NREGA activist from Andhra Pradesh: “All those members who headed the six committees set up under C P Joshi have been removed. The ministry obviously was not happy with these members.”

The six committees were for subjects like transparency, capacity building, wages, type of work and so on. Gopal, Dreze, Roy, Ashwini Kumar and Rangu Rao, headed these committees. Only Madhusudan Mistry, a Congress MP from Gujarat, has managed to retain his membership.

“Rural development secretary B K Sinha was not happy with many of us and so we are out,” says a former member.

The ministry has not informed either the new or earlier members of the new list of names.

“I heard it from others and the ministry confirmed it when I enquired,” says a new member.

While heads are rolling in the council, the continuation of Deshmukh in the ministry itself is being considered doubtful, with a reshuffle expected any day.

The reconstitution of CEGC as well as the decision to call a meeting of the council in the end of June has been seen as a sign of disinterest on the part of the ministry in the institution of the CEGC, conceived as a monitoring body under the NREG Act.

“What is the point of calling a meeting now? What will the CEGC members monitor in the next six months, when there is going to be hardly any work under NREGA?” asks Gopal.

Sinha did not respond to queries about the delay in notification of the council.