Opportunity Knocks
A Block Development Official (BDO) sits a table in his office in town. On his desk is a handwritten roster of about 1700 names of people in the 250 or so villages in his block who have applied for job cards. Some of the names are fictitious. Others are friends and relatives of the BDO. And still others are real, but they are of people who've no idea what their job card entitles them to, or of people who don't even know they've applied. He writes a receipt for a tent--meant to provide shade for road-construction workers--which he never actually bought. He finishes a report that says 12km of road were completed last month; in fact it was only 2km.*
To his district-level supervisor (whose friends and family are also on the job-card roster) the BDO submits all these documents as records of public works in his jurisdiction, and finally he withdraws the corresponding funds from the government coffers. All in a day's work.
Elsewhere, an Adivasi man is still waiting for his first day of work. But on his job card, which he doesn't yet hold, there is already a fake entry showing 126 days' work. On the report submitted to the state auditor, a figure of INR 5950 (CAD $135) is listed as the wages already paid this man. He has no idea.
National Rural Corruption Guarantee?
All of this is provided for by India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005, a law that provides federally funded employment in local development for all willing workers for a minimum of 100 days per year at a minimum wage of 60 Indian Rupees (INR; equivalent to $1.25 Canadian Dollars (CAD)) per day. It stipulates employment for all adults in poor districts through job cards which should be granted within 15 days of application; employment within 5km of one's home village; equal wages for men for women, with a minimum of 33% of job cards in any given village reserved for women; benefits such as unemployment insurance and water.**
Even in a country known for socialist rural economic policies over the first few decades of its independence, few stimulus plans ever developed by the government of India have been as progressive as NREGA. And few schemes ever dreamed up by the government of India have made corruption this easy.
There is overwhelming evidence of systematic corruption of NREGA in every state of India, but nowhere is this corruption more rampant and--due to its infamous mantle as India's poorest state--more devastating than in Orissa.
A 2006-07 independent study by the Centre for Environment and Food Security (CEFS) found that of the INR 7.33 billion (CAD $165 million) invested by the federal government in the NREGA scheme in the 6 poorest districts of the state of Orissa, more than INR 5 billion (CAD $112m, or nearly 70% of all funds) were siphoned off in misappropriations and outright peculation by government officials and middlemen.***
"Activists and NGOs spreading awareness about NREGA among rural poor of the state," noted the CEFS study, "are threatened with dire consequences and many have been terrorised into silence by BDOs and other executing officials. Some local activists who accompanied the CEFS research team during survey in Tentulikhunti block in last week of May are being threatened by the government officials and contractors who have misappropriated NREGA funds."
Putting on a Corruption Clinic
PREM is among the NGOs working to combat corruption, principally by training activists and educating the rural and marginalized public to take action against this scourge. It's not easy, not in an environment where police, government officials and other elites are hand in glove (and glove in pocket). But recently some extra help arrived.
India has a Right to Information (RTI) Act, coincidentally also passed into law in 2005. The RTI Act guarantees access to any public document within 15 days of request. Muster rolls, job cards, payment schedules and BDO reports, to name just a few related to NREGA, are all public documents accessible under RTI.****
One thing PREM has done is establish a number of regional RTI Clinics, such as the one pictured above in Rayagada district. These essentially are training centres where PREM conducts workshops on how to utilize RTI: how to file a request; how to follow up and gain the documents; where to seek legal and other aid if necessary; how to take collective action against corruption. Clinic facilitators utilize methods like group discussion, role play, lawyer visits and testimonials from victims to help instruct community members.
Even beyond the workshops, these RTI clinics are open all the time as walk-in information booths, staffed by community activits who are trained to help victims of corruption take the necessary action for justice.
To read a case study about how PREM's RTI clinics helped one tribal community bring a huge land scam to the public eye (and put the culprits behind bars), check out the July-August 2010 issue of PREM's E-News.
The photos in this post are from an NREGA-funded road-building project in Gajapati district, Orissa.
** Full text of NREGA 2005 [PDF]
*** The six poorest districts of Orissa are Bolangir, Nuapada, Kalahandi, Koraput, Nabarangpur and Rayagada. Read more on this study and the impact of NREGA corruption in Orissa.
**** Full text of RTI Act 2005 [PDF]
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