Unlike the earlier poverty alleviation and employment generation programmes, in NREGS the onus is on the government to provide employment to all those who demand work. In turn, the responsibility also rests on the people to demand employment. It empowers the wage seekers to demand their wages in time which, in turn, acts as a built in safeguard to prevent misappropriation of funds to a large extent. In reality, though, the wage seekers have to wait for long periods to get those few hundred rupees after a few days of hard work. Delays in payments also give scope for misuse of funds while discouraging wage seekers from actively participating in the programme. Hence, the awareness and education about the programme and its guidelines amongst the needy households is a crucial factor to its success.

Findings from the field assessment exercise and data analysis also throw questions on wage employment needs of different households registered under the scheme and the type/shelf of works actually being taken up. There is little or lack of participation of wage seekers in planning the shelf of works and, therefore, low outreach to needy households benefiting from the works.

There is a complete absence of skill building of wage seekers in any form through the NREGS works. Further, there is also no provision for training around new skills, innovation and introduction of drudgery saving tools and technologies. On the contrary, there appears to be a systematic process of deskilling that is occurring in various forms, following the introduction of this scheme. For example, it has been observed in many places that handloom weavers or artisans are moving from a skilled occupation for lack of adequate work and wages into ‘unskilled’ manual labour-based activities in the programme. The spirit of the Act is not to make ‘unskilled’ work attractive but to create more jobs/viable livelihood opportunities, for which skill building is a critical component, although currently ignored.

Though detailed transparency and accountability guidelines are integrated in the design, the current social audit mechanisms seem to be focussing more on fund utilisation rather than the process-related aspects of the programme. There is an immediate need to integrate the training, awareness and, more importantly, the demand-related components as well as the implementation aspects into the monitoring or vigilance process. The very essence and spirit of the scheme is to make the poor and the disadvantaged realise their entitlements through an institutionalised framework and this element is missing to a large extent in the current scheme of things.

The powerlessness of NREGA workers is a reflection of the timidity of grassroots organisational work on this issue. Somehow, political organisations and social movements are yet to seize the vast potential for collective action around NREGA, whether it is through joint work applications, struggles for minimum wages, participatory planning, or building workers’ collective/association. The fact that a large majority of the rural population is still in the dark about the basic features of the Act - almost three years after it was passed - is another symptom of this organisational gap. Unless the workers are organised and demand employment as their entitlement, the programme will fail to fulfil the core spirit laid out in the Act, irrespective of the impressive data.

Development Alternatives (DA) takes cognisance of the opportunities offered by the rural livelihood system and strengths of community collectives to propose an NREGS+ model as a pilot intervention. The proposed pilot intervention addresses the limitations of the NREGS identified in the critique above and is designed to test and demonstrate how large numbers of poor ‘unorganised workers’ can be pulled out of the poverty cycle through converging with planning processes and varied government programmes, building up skills and capacities and setting up essential support systems in the drought-ridden Bundelkhand Region.

The model envisages setting up a ‘Workers’ Employment Support Committee’ (WESC) at each Gram Panchayat and also at each of the two blocks – Badagaon and Niwari.

The WESC will be organised at two levels - village level and block level. This committee will not only raise red flags when processes are short-circuited but also track the cluster groups of workers as they pass through the system, in order to identify up-skilling, convergence possibilities and supports needed at various stages. It will be a supportive mechanism of the workers to uphold their rights of workers, monitor the existence of essential supports, track skill building and act as an employment information hub to negotiate on the behalf of the workers as a bridging platform with NREGS administration.

In contrast to a union, the role of the workers’ committee under NREGS will be principally one of cooperation and involvement in joint management, rather than opposition. To establish itself as a supportive organisation, it will be registered as an association of persons united together by mutual consent to deliberate, determine and act jointly for a common purpose - to defend and promote workers’ interests at work and provide access to opportunities for alternate employment and upgradation of employability skills.

The workers Employment Supporrt Committee is being tested as a robust model to endure the anomalies in terms of realisation of a guaranteed employment that is purely demand driven, as enshrined in the NREG Act. This shall be instrumental in organising the bottom of the pyramid as collectives to negotiating and creating their own space and visibility as equal partners in the development process. q