The father of modern Punjab, Pratap Singh Kairon, was driving to Chandigarh. A dog tried to cross the road, changed its mind, tried to scramble back and got run over. Kairon observed,” That’s the trouble with India. We go half-way and then want to come back. We have no guts.” This sums up the tragedy that is the Employment Guarantee Act (EGA) and Right to Information (RTI) Bill. We have no guts.Are our politicians aware that by diluting the guarantee they are betraying the rural poor? Every five years they beg for the votes of the poor. Once elected, they turn arrogant and plead bad economics. By not guaranteeing the poor work, we are guaranteeing migration in millions into cities. Do we want that? This is not the time to hide behind the ridiculous argument of being cash-strapped. Forget economics. There is enough damning evidence to show how the best of economists have defrauded the poor with bad debts in banks to the tune of Rs 23,782 crore. Bad debts that will never be recovered is a form of dole but since these criminals come from the India Shining category, cutting across party lines, who cares? Forget economics.Witness this amazing transformation. A cringing politician begging for votes has turned into an instant expert on rural poverty who maintains that the Rs 40,000 crore the EGA entails will never reach the poor, it will be eaten by corrupt officials and the touts of MPs Who is to blame for that — the rural poor? You are weak and impotent when it comes to tackling corruption, and you blame the rural poor? You reward corrupt politicians with ministries, and promote corrupt officials and when, for the first time since independence, a bold imaginative guarantee of only 100 days of work a year is a possibility, you back down by diluting it until it is meaningless.The rural poor you’re supposed to guarantee 100 working days have nothing. No land, no house, no food, no school, no drinking water. Some 44 per cent of the population live on less than $1 a day; 86 per cent on less than $2 a day. And how do our ‘beloved’ representatives live? Free housing, travel and healthcare, the best of public schools for their children. Gentleman farmers turned politicians, paying less than the minimum wage to landless labourers working on their thousand-acre farms mocking any hope of genuine land reform, receive fertiliser subsidies totalling Rs 11,800 crore. They can afford to pay market rates if they have two houses and three cars, but they don’t!If they can prevent the rural poor from 100 days of work, in their eyes it’s a patriotic thing to do since they’re preventing wastage. There are rural schools today with no roofs, blackboards, teaching aids, teachers or drinking water. But the children of the rich and influential get the best education, heavily subsidised of course. This is public money totally wasted but are questions being asked? While poor women are denied firewood to cook one meal a day by forest guards, contractors cut down whole forests and make furniture for ministers’ homes, while the middle classes see nothing wrong with giving themselves a cooking gas subsidy (read dole) of up to Rs 6,500 crore.According to the Comptroller and Auditor’s General Report 2000, 40 per cent of all rural households do not get two square meals a day. The innumerable schemes to help them have benefitted only the rural rich. In the name of subsidised food to the poor, Rs 25,000 crore is spent annually. Yet studies have shown what a dismal failure the centrally sponsored schemes are: the Targeted PDS (Rs 13,675 crore); the Pradhana Mantri Gramodaya Yojana; Annapurna (providing grain to the poorest at Rs 2 a kg); Antyodaya (foodgrain to the poor at Rs 2 a kg); the Sampoorna Gramin Yojana (50 lakh tonne grain to the poor costing Rs 5,000 crore); Basic Minimum Services (Rs 3,700 crore). Apply Rajiv Gandhi’s confession that only 17 paise of Re 1 reaches the poor, and look what a colossal fraud we have on our hands!The Supreme Court said food should be given free to the poor since we have a surplus of 60 million tons rotting in FCI godowns. When 21 per cent of the rural poor in India are severely malnourished and they have no purchasing power because we have not been able to provide them guaranteed productive work — the 4.62 lakh fair price shops costing Rs 30,000 crore supposedly reaching 16 crore families are certainly not reaching the poor. While in chronically neglected districts like Bolangir and Baran, starvation deaths are regularly reported. The delivery system right down the line is corrupt and difficult to penetrate because everyone’s hand is soiled. Until the right to information as an idea emerged from the grassroots of Rajasthan to become a national movement, the system was neither transparent nor accountable. The various compartmentalised schemes totaling Rs 25,000 crore are in the hands of these scoundrels and the rural poor is being blamed for corruption. Today corruption is rampant but the fact that not one politician, engineer, village official or contractor has seen the inside of a jail does convey a strong message: keeping looting the exchequer (much more than Rs 40,000 crore) in the name of the poor and we (politicians) will protect you. What the public hearings in the RTI campaigns in Rajasthan revealed was that they were petrified of public humiliation and exposure. What gives the EGA teeth and lethal powers is a good RTI law, because it puts the power in the hands of the rural poor, where it belongs. One Act without the other is meaningless.The Planning Commission is hopelessly indecisive about which of the schemes to slash, since each has its own vested interests. Yet we need to scrap some of them which have only resulted in a parallel bureaucracy and parallel corruption. Scrap the Pradhan Mantri Gramodaya Yojana (Rs 5,000 crore), the Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana (Rs 5,000 crore), the Basic Minimum Services (Rs 3,700 crore): the Annaporna and Antyodaya Schemes. Scrap the National Maternity Benefit Scheme, the National Family Benefit Scheme. Simplify it all into one scheme of employment guarantee. Link 100 days of productive work to food. Let the gram sabhas and panchayats decide what is productive. Let them prepare a new Below Poverty Line (BPL) list of the really poor families. Let all work be subject to a social audit with the completion of a project.It is the job of citizens working with the poor to bring in new ideas from the grassroots. They have seen the horrors of poverty at close quarters, more than any politician or bure-aucrat has in a lifetime. It is the job of the politician/bureaucrat to take note of them and translate them into action.
