Squeezing the state's wallet to get the cash to flow in time

THE NREGA STORY

The concluding part of the report on implementation issues with the rural jobs programme.

One perennial problem with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP) is the long delays in payment of the supposedly guaranteed wages. And activists are now advocating use of specific sections of the law to get compensation for delayed payment.

Payments are made though post offices and banks, and it is possible to use the Payment of Wage Act to get compensation for the delay. The method has been used once in Khunti block of Jharkhand, where activist Jean Dreze and his team of researchers and students became the  first to invoke the law and get the workers Rs 2,000 each in compensation for failure of the state to pay wages within a week.

Encouragement to use the law in like fashion came last month from no less than Union rural development secretary Rita Sharma, at a NREGP mela here.

The problem is real and widespread. Says Prabhu Singh of Undavasan village in Deogarh block of this district: “It is six weeks and there are no wages yet. This is despite the fact that we have accounts in post offices and cooperative bank.”

A survey by Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Samiti based in nearby Devdungri village found that all the panchayats in Deogarh had delayed payment of wages by two months on an average. And all these were accounts opened by post offices and some by cooperative banks.

Now MKSS wants to invoke the law. Say Nikhil De and Shankar Singh of MKSS, “We are working on how this can be done.”

Ambesh Upmanyu, Director, Posts, for Rajasthan says it is next to impossible to make payments before at least four months. “That is the time taken for us to receive wage lists of the numerous workers from various worksites. Unless we get the wage lists from the government machinery, we cannot make payments,” he says.

Upmanyu says the post offices got getting wage lists for work done in June 2008 in June 2009. “If you dont trust the gram sevak with the money and want the system to take care of it, the system will take its own time.”

However, his department has now decided to start a fund to hire people on contractto share the work of payment of wages. “We can hire as many as five workers for five days every month,” he says.

The NREGA wages are weighing heavily on banks, too. Banks are overburdened, says Ranjit Pawar, sarpanch of Rabadiyavas in Jetaran block of Pali. “It is just too much work for the banks, with every village opening up to 500 accounts and expecting wages every week. Obviously, banks have little time or staff to do so much of work.”

Applying the Payment of Wages Act may force the wage payers to get their act together.