Legal backing a must to make urban employment schemes effective: Activists

Other features of an ideal scheme include adequate funding to boost Urban Local Bodies, minimum wages for workers, and exclusion of contractors from projects, among other things

A few weeks back, Rajasthan became the sixth state in the country to announce plans to start an urban employment guarantee programme on the lines of MGNREGA for the poor.

Though the broad guidelines of the schemes are still being worked out, the allocation of about Rs 800 crore shows that the state government does not want it to be just another populist move that stays largely on paper, civil society activists said.

Before, Rajasthan, five other states--Jharkhand, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Himachal Pradesh--had initiated their own urban employment guarantee schemes.

Of these, Kerala has perhaps the longest serving programme for urban employment. It goes by the name of ‘Ayyankali Urban Employment Guarantee Scheme’.

All the other guarantee programmes were launched after Covid struck the country in March 2020.

A key differentiating factor between the urban employment guarantee programmes and schemes launched so far, and MGNREGA, is that most of them don’t have a legal backing, unlike MGNREGA, and more often than not are just welfare measures.

“But the fact that state governments of late have indeed woken up to the need for an urban equivalent of MGNREGA is an acceptance of the enormity of the employment problem in urban areas,” Amit Basole, who heads the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University, told Business Standard.

Apart from being bereft of the kind of legal cover that MGNREGA does, many of the state schemes do not have adequate provisions to promote self-employment opportunities in urban clusters, such as for street vendors etc.

To this, Basole says the programmes are meant to provide some sort of regular work to urban casual manual labour. The self-employed, like street vendors, have different sets of challenges and the two should not be equated.

Several experts feel that if better working conditions are created for vegetable vendors, many people will start vegetable vending, which will create new employment opportunities while dignifying the existing ones.

Therefore, instead of a legally sanctioned or mandated work programme like MGNREGA, it is better to promote self-employment opportunities in urban areas.

The urban schemes

Just after the first wave of Covid-19, Himachal Pradesh notified such a scheme, followed by Odisha and Jharkhand.

Prior to that, Kerala had already put in place a running urban employment scheme.

The Himachal Pradesh scheme, called the Mukhya Mantri Shahri Ajeevika Guarantee Yojana, seeks to provide 120 days of guaranteed wage employment to every household in urban areas, and the Odisha initiative--the Urban Wage Employment Initiative--is an employment scheme with an initial allocation of Rs 100 crore for six months, starting April 2020.

In both the programmes, the urban local bodies will identify projects, enroll job seekers and ensure timely payment of wages, monitoring of work.

The Kerala model

One of the most successful and longest-running urban employment initiatives is Kerala’s Ayyankali Urban Employment Guarantee Scheme or (AUEGS) which, according to the scheme’s website, aims at enhancing the livelihood security of people in urban areas by guaranteeing 100 days of wage-employment in a financial year to a household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

The scheme also aims to provide a strong, rights-based social safety net for Kerala's urban dwellers, by giving a fallback employment source when other job alternatives are scarce.

According to a report by The Hindu, Kerala thus became the first state to launch an employment guarantee scheme for urban areas with the launch of the Ayyankali scheme, modelled around the MGNREGS, in 2010.

Of the 250,000 workers registered across the state, 150,000 are active workers. Of this set, a staggering 90 per cent are women, the report said.

The report adds that the scheme was slow to pick up in the initial years due to low demand, lack of awareness and insufficient allocations.

The fund allocation, which was at Rs 15 crore in 2015, has increased considerably with Rs 100 crore allocated lately. The report also said that daily wage under the scheme is a minimum of Rs 291, and on par with MGNREGS wages.

The Hindu report also said that during the past few years, the scheme has been combined with Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) and Livelihood Inclusion and Financial Empowerment (LIFE) housing scheme, under which beneficiaries receive an amount equivalent to 90 person-days of work, or close to Rs 30,000, in addition to the Rs 4 lakh allocated in the housing scheme for participating in house construction.

“The linking of the job guarantee scheme with the housing schemes was one factor in increasing the total person-days of work generated over the past few years,” the report said.

Ideal urban jobs scheme

Most civil society activists and those who have been working on the ground on urban and rural employment issues, feel that an urban employment scheme should have two basic characteristics: first it should have some sort of legal backing like MGNREGA, and second it should be adequately funded.

“The basic and most fundamental requirement of a guaranteed urban employment programme should be its ability tp provide a legal guarantee for employment, along with unemployment wages for those who don’t get work under the programme. That apart, just like in panchayats for MGNREGA, the Urban Local Bodies needs to be strengthened. This has not happened in other state schemes so far. They just allocated a budget of Rs 60-100 crore which is grossly inadequate,” Rakshita from the People’s Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG) had told Business Standard some time back.

There are a few other features that an ideal urban employment guarantee programme must have. These include adequate funding to strengthen the Urban Local Bodies, entitlement for all workers to statutory minimum wages that are regularly revised, just like MGNREGA wages, and no permission to use machinery, except in unusual circumstances or when the project cost crosses a certain threshold. 

The use of contractors should also be prohibited unless project cost crosses a fixed threshold. Besides, the works need to well defined, because simply replicating MGNREGA in urban areas is not feasible. Finally, special initiatives should be taken to protect the employment of urban self-employed like rag pickers, rehriwallahs etc.

How far and how much will the new Rajasthan scheme match these requirements only time will tell.