Q&A: Deep Joshi, NAC member

'To say NAC is unconstitutional is unfair'

Civil society has been at the centre of several controversies in recent months, and under that rubric, the National Advisory Council (NAC) has been attracting growing censure for its role in governance. NAC member Deep Joshi, founder of rural livelihood NGO Pradan and 2009 Ramon Magsaysay award winner, explains why the criticism is misplaced. Edited excerpts from an interview with Kanika Datta:

The National Advisory Council (NAC) has been variously accused of being full of jholawalas and making an unconstitutional grab for power.
Speaking in my personal capacity, I am very surprised. There are all types of impressions about the NAC. For instance, I recently got a phone call from an unknown number and the person wanted to know how one applies to become a member of the NAC! Now, if you look at the NAC today, three out of the 14 members are “blue-blooded” jholawalas in the sense that we have spent most of our lives working with NGOs — myself, Aruna and Mirai Chatterjee. So this description is not correct.

 

Also, it is an advisory body. Yes, it is headed by Mrs Gandhi who happens to chair the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and head the Congress Party. So, presumably, if something goes from the NAC it will not be thrown in the dustbin. But there has not been any instance in which people have simply accepted things because they have come from the NAC. The idea is that this is a body that tries to bring in voices from the ground. Often, these recommendations are placed on the NAC website so that people can respond — for instance, on the land acquisition Bill. It’s not just citizens who write in, so do government departments — central and states. At the end of the day making laws is the business of government and cabinet and Parliament. To say this is an extra-constitutional authority is unfair. After all, the NAC was appointed by the prime minister — our taxi fare and what-have-you all gets compensated from the prime minister’s office.

But it has a bureaucratic set-up attached to it and therefore the same degree of formality as, say, the prime minister’s advisory council.
There are other committees headed by non-officials — for instance, the Economic Advisory Council is headed by Dr Rangarajan who is not part of the government.

But the prime minister is executive head of government; Mrs Gandhi isn’t. So should she have a similar advisory body with the government bandobast behind it?
True, as chairperson she has been given the rank of a cabinet. That’s the way the government has constituted it. But that does not make it extra-constitutional. It would if it had the power to overrule or dictate what elected governments are supposed to do.

So why do you think there is this antagonism towards the NAC?
Because we often bring viewpoints that may be at variance with the government’s viewpoint. Take the Forest Rights Act. Those of us who travel regularly to tribal areas know there are problems with its implementation. For example, this law says if tribals have been occupying a piece of land they would be given pattas. This would not give them the right to alienate the land – they can’t sell it – but their children can inherit. But I have been to villages where people are not aware of this law, or where they have applied a year ago they haven’t heard back since. The government didn’t even make a form! When we point out these problems, it insists everything is okay. So when we keep emphasising such problems, obviously there will be issues.

Also, the UPA I had a common minimum programme (CMP) and the NAC was constituted to ensure that the CMP was implemented. In this case there is no CMP so in some ways, there is a bit of ambiguity.

One of the major criticisms against the NAC I and II is that they committed the government to unsustainable expenditures — NREGA, the Right to Food Bill…
Let’s start with NREGA. Everybody agrees that there are lots of problems with how it is being implemented. Corruption is one issue. The other part is whether the money is being used to create rural assets. Now, two-thirds of India is rain-fed, is not covered by irrigation, which leads to many problems such as farmers not investing in the land and so on. We’ve not done any investment in these areas since independence. My own estimate is that we need to invest something like Rs 4 lakh crore over a 10- to 15-year period to transform these rain-fed areas and make them self-sustaining and a driver of the Indian economy (at the end of the day, the buying power is in rural India). If you look at the schedule under NREGA out of the eight items that can be taken up, six are of this nature — harvesting rainwater, building check dams, and so on. Unfortunately, this is not happening. There are multiple reasons — we don’t have an implementing structure on the ground, the panchayats are supposed to do it, the proposals for developing works under NREGA are supposed to come from the gram sabhas. But in many parts of the country the gram sabhas have 5,000 members, sometimes 15,000. How can such a large assembly take such decisions? So in most cases the Block Development Officer will simply go to the sarpanch and say, get a resolution for this. Now, the easiest thing to do is roads, the next easiest thing is to build big talaabs, which do not always serve the purpose. But if we really wanted NREGA to create rural assets we need the capability at the panchayat level.

Sure but NREGA is a welfare programme rather than a rural investment scheme, so you are getting a lot of ennui in implementation — people getting paid for six hours a day not to do much. So, it’s impinging on the government’s finances and also raising the cost of labour. Such outcomes are prompting allegations of the NAC holding power without responsibility.
Well, first, it was part of the CMP of UPA I, so it is not something extraneous that the NAC introduced. In fact, it is sad that the state governments have not used NREGA, especially in rain-fed areas. If the state governments had wanted this kind of money for irrigation they would never have got it — the total allocation for the watershed development programme during this plan was Rs 9,500 crore, whereas NREGA’s one-year budget is Rs 40,000 crore. Second, if it is a good idea being badly implemented why should the blame be put on people who thought of the idea? After all, concepts like liberty and justice are also being badly implemented in this country. Would you then say those who thought of liberty, justice, equality and so on are jokers?

Coming to the Right to Food, its costs are also considered unsustainable in the long run.
There are so many areas where we are giving subsidies — I get subsidised cooking gas, diesel, petrol, fertiliser. Why should I? If one is willing to take these political decisions of where to give subsidies and where to subsidise, it would be different.

Many critics have pointed out that the delivery system needs to be revamped. Yet people like Aruna Roy and Jean Dreze oppose the smart card system…
So do I! There is a lot of talk about pressing a button in Delhi and getting a direct money transfer to someone’s account. Such people should visit tribal areas and look at the banking and post office infrastructure. In fact, one of the problems of NREGA is that the government – not the NAC – has said money will be transferred only through banks. Why don’t you distribute the cash in a gram sabha in the presence of everybody — after all, everybody cannot be a thief. Banking correspondents have their own limitations — they can disburse a very limited amount of money. All of these ideas are good for places that are well-connected. The NAC didn’t say don’t use smart cards — it said try it out first. But it is also the NAC’s case that there are other ways to do it. For example, Chhattisgarh set up a monitoring system quite successfully. My own view is that unless we empower communities all things can be corrupted — smart cards, banking correspondents. Unfortunately we have depended too much on this top-down system and done little to hand over power to the people.