Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan showcase some of the radical possibilities of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act .

Back in 2004, when the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) first made headlines, many including some of the Act’s most ardent supporters predicted that corruption and poor delivery structures would together undo any benefit that the scheme could bring to the poor. Two and a half years on, early analyses of NREGA suggest things are not quite as bad as most had predicted. In some parts of India, almost 95 per cent wages have reached the poor. Of course there is corruption and wasted expenditure — Orissa is now infamous for the bungling of crores of NREGA funds. But, the Act has also been a catalyst for some state governments to develop innovative systems for ensuring transparency and accountability in its implementation.

Andhra Pradesh is one such state. In 2006, the Andhra government embarked on a process to institutionalise social audits for all NREGA programmes in the state. To do this, the government collaborated with civil society organisations for building up a 35-member team that facilitates and manages the audit process. This team is responsible for identifying and training educated village youth who conduct the actual audit. Andhra now holds an average of 64 audits a month. Details of government expenditure on NREGA are verified, assets developed are assessed and information on the NREGA is shared with village communities. The audits culminate with a public meeting — attendance varies between 500-1,000 people — where audit findings are shared in the presence of local government officials and politicians.

 In the last five months alone, over Rs 60 lakh of embezzled money has been returned by local officials in full public view. On other occasions, local officials who have indulged in petty corruption have been reprimanded and even sacked. Andhra’s experiment is significant not just for its successes in curbing corruption. What makes Andhra’s experiment unique is that it marks the first time in independent India’s history that the government has willingly opened its doors to public scrutiny and done so by proactively mobilising communities.

Rajasthan is another state which has been at the forefront of many innovations in strengthening NREGA. This is hardly surprising given that Rajasthan is the home of the movement for the right to information and employment guarantee. Yet, while Rajasthan has been relatively successful in curbing obvious corruption, poor management and weak delivery structures have contributed to serious inefficiencies in the actual delivery of NREGA. One critical fallout of this is that labourers are unable to access the minimum wage despite putting in a full eight hours of work — the average NREGA beneficiary earned a meagre Rs 51 per day in 2006-2007 even though the statutory minimum wage for the state is Rs 73.

The reasons for this are complex. To begin with, the general practice in wage employment programmes is for payments to be made on the basis of the ‘task’ performed, or the total output per day. So if an NREGA labourer is working on a worksite to extract gravel for building a road, her daily rate is determined on the basis of the total quantum of gravel extracted through the day. To manage this process, a junior engineer — usually a block level officer — is assigned the task of taking measurements at the worksite and on that basis calculating the total wage due. It is, of course, impossible for the junior engineer to make daily visits to each worksite in his area of jurisdiction and he usually waits till the work is completed before taking measurements. A great amount of secrecy surrounds this calculation process. Consequently, the individual labourer is never quite aware of the correlation between individual work done and wages received. This encourages free riders — after all, what incentive would you have to work if you knew that your wages depended on the output of hundred others? As a result productivity suffers and minimum wages rarely received.

 Public pressure for transparency and regular monitoring by civil society has helped push the Rajasthan government to look for innovative ways to streamline measurement and payment processes. One such experiment took place in November this year when the government collaborated with the Rozgar Evum Suchna Ka Adhikar Abhiyaan, a coalition of civil society organisations in Rajasthan, to develop a decentralised work site management system. Over 165 activists from the abhiyaan participated in a month-long campaign to create a pool of trained worksite managers — an innovation on the traditional mate who maintains muster rolls and supervises the work site — that take daily measurements of worksites and determine daily output. The activists worked closely with local officials to develop model worksites and identify management practices that ensure transparency in measurement processes and through that overcome the free-rider problem. The key emphasis was transparency. All labourers were kept informed of the total quantum of work that needed to be completed for them to access the minimum wage. Moreover, labourers were divided into groups of 5 each and the worksite manager was responsible for assigning specific tasks to each group at the start of the work day.

The results have been truly fantastic. In Jalore district as many as 3000 mates were trained to become full-fledged worksite managers. Each mate was given a calculator, a measuring tape and taught simple formulae for converting measurements into wages. More, over 2,000 of these trained mates were women. This could dramatically improve work conditions for women — who are the major participants in NREGA in the state. At the end of the training, most labourers in the model Panchayats were able to access Rs 73 per day.

It would be naive to suggest these experiments represent a magic bullet solution to our greatest problem — the failure of accountability in public services. But they have unleashed a hopeful momentum. These experiments demonstrate the potential strength of ‘collaborations’ between civil society and government in strengthening transparency and accountability.

If these innovations are encouraged and allowed to flourish, the NREGA will offer us more than guaranteed employment. It may well guarantee us better and, on an optimistic day, good governance!

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