The brutal murder
of young Jharkhand activist Lalit
Mehta exposes the violent opposition of vested interests deeply
threatened by the radical provisions of NREGA.
Lalit Kumar Mehta, full-time activist of Vikas Sahyog Kendra (VSK), was
brutally murdered on the 14th of May 2008, on his way home through the
Kandra forest. He was 36. Lalit leaves behind his 28-year-old Adivasi
wife and their two babies, aged one and three.
The VSK is an Adivasi-led organisation whose activists have worked over
the last 15 years in the Palamu district of Jharkhand for secure rights
over natural resources and sustainable livelihoods. Palamu typifies the
most backward Adivasi hinterlands of India, whose incredible wealth of
natural resources is matched only by the deep distress of its people.
Drought, poverty and hunger stalk a land where they can easily be
overcome. This requires a people-centred, nature-nourishing approach to
development, fine-tuned to the needs of each location. For the VSK, the
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) holds out precisely
such a promise.
Young VSK activists like Lalit have been working hard to make NREGA
realise its potential. At the time of his murder, Lalit was busy
organising social audits of NREGA works. He was murdered just the day
before a major audit was scheduled to take place. A CBI enquiry into
the death, bringing his assailants to justice and compensation for
Lalit's family are the least the government must do to compensate for
this incalculable loss. Meanwhile, it would be instructive to try and
understand why NREGA work can turn out to be so fraught with danger.
The answer lies in the real radicalism of NREGA.
Mainstream discussions on the employment guarantee have been largely
dismissive, left, right and centre. The political right views it as yet
another meaningless palliative, a relief programme wasting its time on
agriculture and rural development, while unnecessarily burdening the
fiscal deficit. For it, the answer lies in getting people out of rural
areas by focussing on urbanisation and industrialisation. Completely
forgetting that these remedies have failed, despite having been tried
for over 50 years now. Others, who occupy the centre of the debate,
consider it important to address rural distress, especially in view of
growing farmers' suicides but suggest that the much more effective way
would be direct cash transfers. They argue that the NREGA needlessly
complicates mechanisms of delivery. How much simpler it would be to
just hand out doles.
As Lalit's tragic death has shown, these observers completely miss the
wood for the trees, ignoring the much larger challenge NREGA poses to
governance structures in India's hinterlands. For it is a programme
based on a constitutional right to demand work, not dependent on the
whimsical largesse of the state. At the extreme left of the political
spectrum, there are those who suggest that the NREGA is one big
conspiracy, a pain-killer so to speak, that seeks only to legitimise
the dominant market-based policies of our time. What they fail to see
is that the struggle to deepen democracy at the grass-roots must always
imaginatively take advantage of spaces opened up by the state, whatever
may or may not have been the compulsions or motivation for them to be
created in the first place.
Lalit and his work, now much more eloquently before us, help shake off
each of these anti-NREGA misconceptions. By revealing the heinous
opposition of threatened vested interests, his ultimate sacrifice
teaches us a great deal about the massive transformatory potential
inherent in the Act. For NREGA programmes visualise a decisive break
with the past. Ever since independence, rural development has largely
been the monopoly of local contractors, who have emerged as major
agents of exploitation of the rural poor, especially women. Almost
every aspect of these programmes, including the schedule of rates that
is used to measure and value work done, has been tailor-made for local
contractors. These people invariably tend to be local power brokers.
They implement programmes in a top-down manner, run roughshod over
basic human rights, pay workers a pittance and use labour-displacing
machinery.
NREGA is poised to change all that. It places a ban on contractors and
their machines. It mandates payment of statutory minimum wages and
provides various legal entitlements to workers. It visualises the
involvement of local people in every decision whether it be the
selection of works and work-sites, the implementation of projects or
their social audit. All of this is obviously incompatible with
programmes where the main goal was, in effect, the maximisation of
profits of the contractor. But even after the enactment of NREGA,
things have been slow to change at the grass-roots. Displaying
remarkable ingenuity, the old order is already finding ways to sidestep
the radical provisions of the Act. Contractors deploy machines with
impunity, even as forged muster rolls are filled up with fictitious
names and thumb-marks of workers, to show as if the work was done by
labour. This is especially the case in States like Jharkhand, which
still do not have elected Gram Panchayats.
It is in this context that activists like Lalit become a major threat
for local vested interests, all part of the long chain of recipients of
sleaze-money siphoned out of NREGA. Jean Dreze, one of the architects
of NREGA, who was with him just hours before he died, says that Lalit's
work "revealed high levels of corruption involving people in high
places." It is evident that these people were sufficiently threatened
to feel compelled to silence Lalit's voice. Even as we struggle to come
to terms with the immediate loss of a young life full of adventure and
exciting possibilities, this is also a moment of deep reflection for
all those who continue to believe in the huge change NREGA can bring to
rural India.
The question Lalit's death should pose to us is: have we done enough to
make it possible for NREGA to realise its enormous potential? Or will
the forces of change represented by people like Lalit continue to
hopelessly battle the powers-that-be who want business-as-usual in
India's rural hinterlands, especially our Adivasi forest areas?
The problem NREGA faces can be stated in very simple terms. Its
ostensible purpose is to overthrow the old contractor-raj but it has
done little to offer an adequate replacement. Gram Panchayats have been
designated the chief implementing agency but they have not been
provided with the support structure required to execute the programme.
A new bottom-up, people-centred approach to planning of works and
social audit is spoken of but the social mobilisers and technical
personnel required to make this a reality have not been supplied. The
biggest employment programme ever undertaken in human history faces a
huge crunch of quality human resources. This calls for a massive
national campaign for capacity building of grass-roots workers. The
Schedules of Rates remain the same that the contractor-raj used. They
underpay labour, especially in earthen watershed works, making a
mockery of statutory minimum wages, a legal entitlement under NREGA.
They discriminate against women by underpaying or not even recognising
specific work done by them.
Development initiative
The sooner the government realises the anachronism of "new wine in old
bottles" that the NREGA has become, the better. This is not an
old-style famine relief kind of welfare programme. This is a
development initiative, chipping in with crucial public investments for
creation of durable assets, which can provide the much-needed impetus
to private investment in the most backward regions of India. The thrust
is on construction of earthen dams, bunds and ponds as part of a
watershed development strategy. On this foundation of water security,
can be built a sustainable village development plan that includes a
rejuvenated agriculture and allied rural livelihoods. For such a
programme to be successful needs a new professional support structure.
This structure must be mainstreamed within the government system.
Wherever possible, it can also be provided by civil society. Lalit
Mehta's organisation Vikas Sahyog Kendra is part of a National
Consortium of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) initiated in 2007.
These CSOs, working across 34 districts in 8 States of India, have
committed themselves to supporting gram panchayats (GPs) to implement
NREGA. They have been formally invited by GPs to help them plan,
implement and social audit NREGA work. Consortium partners have worked
to create awareness among people about the Act and its provisions,
built a dialogue with GP leadership, filled lacunae in the planning
process and ensured greater participation of rural people in the
functioning of the employment guarantee. Of course, in Jharkhand the
absence of GPs is itself the real weakness. But a clear mandate from
the government supporting CSOs working on NREGA would provide the
much-needed protection to thousands of unsung activists like Lalit
Mehta, who in their undiminished optimism about India's future,
continue to risk their lives to make initiatives like NREGA a success.
(The writer is co-founder, National Consortium of Civil Society
Organisations supporting Gram Panchayats in planning, implementation
and social audit of NREGA works.)
http://www.hindu.com/2008/05/22/stories/2008052253871000.htm
Copyright © 2008, The Hindu.
