Sreelatha Menon: Job scheme martyrs

EAR TO THE GROUND

Sonamati Devi, the illiterate president of Rajkheda panchayat in the Dudhi block of Uttar Pradesh's Sonbhadra district, is in jail. She and many other illiterate women panchayat presidents in the country have been functioning as rubber stamps, while the men in the family, mostly husbands, run the show.

She has been accused of misappropriating funds meant for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which provides the rural poor at least 100 days of work in a year.

When she was booked in January this year, the entire Dudhi block's 50 panchayat presidents threw their weight behind her by refusing to implement the NREGS. Their fear was that the programme, the way it was being implemented, would land all of them in jail. They alleged they are forced to pay up to 30 per cent cut to block development officers (BDOs) and their subordinates to access the money for distributing wages under the scheme. This means they can be accused of misappropriation. The audit is done by officials of the BDO office. Hence, whatever the panchayats pay can be questioned depending on what conclusions the engineer sent by the BDO arrives at.

Ambika Prasad, Sonamati Devi's husband, says his wife is being framed as she refused to pay bribes to officials.

Whatever the truth, a woman is in jail, an alleged martyr of the BDO-dominated implementation of the NREGS.

A week after Sonamati Devi's arrest, panchayats in the Dudhi block received orders that the wage funds would be directly transferred to panchayat pradhans. While there is no link here with the arrest, that will solve only a part of the problem. The issue of audit by officials after the wages have been paid leaves panchayats in a vulnerable position.

The list of martyrs doesn't end with Sonamati Devi. Those who point a finger at the corrupt are also vulnerable. Another panchayat president, tribal leader Narayan Hareka of Borigi panchayat in the Narayanpatna block of Orissa's Koraput district, was found murdered on May 9. He was a block convener of the Orissa Adivasi Manch and had conducted a survey that found that 34 per cent job cards had not been distributed. His protests led to an increase in the percentage of cards distributed to 90 per cent. Manch activists told journalists that people were being kept in the dark about the scheme and the contractors were making money by misusing the job cards. His protests obviously hurt their interests. A more recent martyr is Kameshwar Yadav, a block committee member of the CPI(ML) in Giridih, Jharkhand. His body was found on June 7. Kameshwar was active in exposing the corrupt role of contractors and middlemen in implementation of the NREGS and mobilised job-seekers to demand proper implementation of the scheme.

Kameshwar's murder comes on the heels of the killing of another NREGS activist, Lalit Mehta, in the Palamu district of Jharkhand . Mehta, a civil engineer-turned-activist, was brutally murdered in the Kandra jungles on May 14 after he exposed irregularities in the implementation of the scheme. Are these martyrs of corruption or illiteracy? The unlettered poor at whom the crumbs of the NREGS are directed and who can barely comprehend how to access these are the living dead and hence probably worse off, though no one will lay a wreath before their hovels.