Nadia's unemployment guarantee scheme

Fifty year old Nondo Duloi sits idle outside his mud house located on the outskirts of Joania village in Krishna Nagar block of Nadia district, about 135 kms from Kolkata. He has to feed a family of four, but there is no work.

The government’s promise to hike the minimum wages under the nation al Employment Guarantee project (NREGP) has no meaning for Duloi. For, even at the state’s minimum wage of Rs 80, he has been unable to get any work under the scheme. All he could get this year was some work in the fields during harvest time.

Duloi is one of the villagers with a job card under NREGP. He was luckier last year when he got five days work. In fact, this correspondent could not meet anyone in Joania who had worked for more than five days last year.

Agricultural work fetches Rs 50-70 a day, much less than Rs 80 under NREGP. But at least some jobs are still available and payment comes instantly, unlike NREGP wages which always take time to disburse.

For example, Basudeb Dhara, who hardly got two-three days work under NREGP last year, got his payments after five-six months.

Many like Jadav Debnath haven’t even got their cards and many like him either work in the fields, or migrate to other states in search of work.

Omkar Singh Meena, district magistrate, Nadia, blames the village pradhans for the poor performance of NREGP. “Work in many of the gram panchayats have not been satisfactory because of inefficiency of the panchayat pradhans,” he says, adding that he has written to them asking for an explanation.

He also blames heavy farm activity for the poor demand for NREGP. “Nadia has high cropping intensity of 260 per cent. The admissible items under NREGA like excavation, re-excavation, earth work are neither practical, nor feasible all round the year, so we are looking at converging NREGA works with pucca road construction, construction of drainage channel, solid waste management and social forestry. We have developed model estimates and sent them to all gram panchayats and directed them to make NREGP feasible,” says Meena.

Last fiscal, of the total of 6,60,247 number of job card holders in the district, only 1,16,426 demanded work.

A survey done by ‘Aam Admi ka Sipahi’, a local youth wing formed to monitor the implementation of the government’s flagship scheme, found that the implementation of NREGP in most of the gram panchayats in Nadia district has failed because of lack of awareness among the masses and inefficiency and unwillingness of the gram panchayat pradhans.

Another problem is the wage measurement mechanism, which is based on the amount of land one excavates. The maximum wage an NREGP labourer in Bengal might get after digging 88 cubic feet of land is Rs 81. Sometimes, the wages come down to Rs 60, even Rs 40, depending on the amount of work done. Generally two or three labourers work on a given plot of land, the total amount dug is measured by a Nirman Sahayak after a week and divided by the number of labourers, which leads to a lower wage per day.

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