Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung has not been given nearly enough credit for his homily that to initiate radical change, one should first ?bomb the headquarters?. In India, where everything progresses at a Hindu rate of growth, this can be applied to a great many situations. In fact, on Monday afternoon, National Advisory Council (NAC) members Aruna Roy and Jean Dr?ze advised a similar course of action for the Committee on Employment Guarantee Act (CEGA) that monitored the UPA government?s flagship programme. NREGA has been a source of fierce debate, fiercer now than five years ago. Roy and Dr?ze, credited with coming up with the idea, had earlier resigned as members of the NAC over what they perceived as betrayal of their idea. This time round, they have advised that CEGA be restructured.
At a press conference to go over the implementation of NREGA, a weighty press docket almost obscured this little gem. Over the last few weeks, members of the CEGA?mainly activists and politicians belonging to the ruling party?have been at loggerheads over just where this programme should head. Former Congress MP from Gujarat Madhusudan Mistry had a very public spat with Roy and Dr?ze a few weeks back when he said that ?activists have no business questioning the credibility of politicians like me?. Union rural development minister CP Joshi has never had a comfortable relationship with the activists in the bunch, riding rough shod over them to introduce the Rajiv Gandhi Sewa Kendra component to NREGA. This, activists say, paved the way for the contractor mafia to enter the programme.
The political ownership of the programme has come up very hard against the activists. As NAC members, Dr?ze and Roy are not formally part of the government, but are, because of the fact that Sonia Gandhi heads the NAC, an important part of policymaking. The spat between the Union rural development minister and Congressmen like Madhusudan Mistry on one side and Dr?ze and Roy on the other, reflects that this was always an uneasy alliance.
The experiment that is the NAC appears to be fraying at the edges because, in governance parlance, the headquarters are never conceded.