MUTINY

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Gurantee Act (MGNREGA) is one of the greatest achievement of the UPA govt. headed by Dr. Manmohan Singh. The act which is targetted at improving the purchasing power of rural people gurantees the rural people ,employment for 100 days an year at a daily wage of Rs 120. The bill was enacted by legislation on August 25, 2005. Central government outlay for scheme is 40,000 crore (US$8.8 billion) in FY 2010–11.
Though this is one of the biggest step taken by a democratic govt. towards rural empowerment and overall development of the village people, its time for us to rethink about the actual results of this. As myself is from Kerala, I would like to discuss the things happening in Kerala, in the name of this MGNREGA. The state of Kerala is basically a consumer state, who buys almost all goods from its neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and AP. Each keralite spents almost half of his earning in purchasing goods ranging from rice, vegetables comming from these states. One of the major reason for Kerala’s dependency on other states is the fact that none of these is produced in this state. The biggest reason for this is unavailability of labour and high wages prevailing in the state. In earlier times labour was available in the state and most of the available land in the state was cultivated and the yield was also good enough to support individual families involved in farming. But now a days, this labour, which is inevitable for producing agricultural products is not available in the state. One of the major reason for this condition which happened in the very recent time is due to the introduction of MGNREGA.
As it is enforced by law that the local bodies should gurantee employment for 120 days for the registered members under this scheme, local bodies are forced to create employment. For this they do unnecessary jobs like cleaning the sides of an already neat road etc. Interestingly all these jobs are done just to give 100 days of work. And since its only monitered by local bodies, the intensity and seriousness of job is too light and no body takes it seriously. So there is a sense of easy going for people who are into job. The major issue in this is that now no worker is available or rather not willing to do any job in the fields of a private person due to which he is forced to keep his land uncultivated. If going to a private persons , these labours have to do all the job he advocates and that too for the full working hours. But this is not in the case of MGNREGA.
This is the case in Kerala. I am not exactly aware of what’s happening in other parts of the country. As a solid tax payer, Its my responsibility to question these type of activities happening in our state. What govt had to do is to think how these workers registered with MGNREGA can be effectively utilized for the betterment of agriculture and farming activities in rural regions of the state. Although now there is a provision of sending these workers to the land of private parties in a rotation manner, its not effective as these workers are not interested in working with private peoples. So govt should make use of these work forces in the state to the betterment of the people of the state. Instead of creating unnecessary jobs, productive areas should be identified and these workers are to be deputed there, so that the valuable money of the tax payers are not wasted and its fully utilized for the development of the country.

The author is in Twitter as @johnsiypparayil.