Wages, payment of wages and monitoring of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) continues to be a problem for the UPA?s flagship programme. The familiar refrain of the Act being good and the implementation faulty has been raised in chorus again by activists who work on the ground. The one glorious exception to this litany of corruption and good intentions gone awry is the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
Tamil Nadu?s distinction becomes even more significant when you factor in the fact that it is the only state that also opted to remain with the process of handing out cash payments rather than routing wages through bank accounts. When the Centre had floated the idea of routing payment of wages through bank accounts, the logic that had been advanced was that leakages could be plugged through an electronic trail of the money. At that time, Tamil Nadu was the only state that said it could monitor the cash payments effectively but would have a problem with banking infrastructure in the hinterland. It stuck with cash payments, and has a better, cleaner record than most other states.
Therefore, without technological crutches, how is it that Tamil Nadu was able to do what other states could not? The answer is as simple and as complex as it can get. Quite simply, unlike other states, political masters in Tamil Nadu realised early on that the NREGA had political traction written all over it.
Unlike other states, the beneficiaries of NREGA voted and did so with their bellies full rather than on empty promises, fake muster rolls and ridiculous one rupee payments.
The reward for better monitoring were tangible and something that every politician and bureaucrat understood. Let?s not forget that this is also the state where a promise of a free colour television set during elections was not enough, cable connections were also demanded and given.
If the system is geared to deliver from the top, it will do so. And we have seen this repeatedly in programmes and policies across the country. In the case of the Vajpayee government, it was road development and the Golden Quadrilateral; in Chhattisgarh it is the distribution of subsidised rice and wheat. When the ownership of a programme is established and gives an electoral dividend, it invariably turns out to be successful.
Development economists say that the NREGA is the first programme in India that has adopted a rights-based approach to entitlements. That is, it is a legally enforceable right and moves away from the traditional formulation of a paternalistic state disbursing largesse at its discretion. It is not altruism which ensures that benefits reach those who need it most, but a legal undertaking made by the state, enforceable by the law of the land.
Yet the experience of Tamil Nadu reinforces rather strongly that in a democratic set-up like India, power flows only from the ballot and nowhere else. Whether or not the enfeebled beneficiaries of the NREGA can go to court to demand what is due to them, they do vote.
In Tamil Nadu, and to a certain extent in Andhra Pradesh, although there appears to be no fatigue regarding caste arithmetic and its effect on electoral fortunes, there is a growing realisation among the political class and the electorate that development goals can be a barometer to test political performance.
In many ways, NREGA is a great opportunity to change some of the electoral givens in India. Some glimmers of it have already appeared. Like a village in Tonk district in Rajasthan where beneficiaries humiliated upon receiving only one rupee as wage for eight hours of labour sent it off to chief minister Ashok Gehlot saying that the money was of better use to his relief fund than the farmers. Needless to say, come election time, this may yet haunt Gehlot.
For ensuring better enforcement therefore, more than an honest officer or bureaucrat or a well-meaning politician, the beneficiaries have to be made aware that rewards and punishments lie in their hands.
nistula.hebbar@expressindia.com