The employment guarantee scheme is caught in religious debates in Delhi. According to one canonical proposition, an employment guarantee is anti-reform. If you are pushed to the wall, agree to a minimum of area, population and income coverage, be done with it and let’s get on with disinvestment. To another school, employment guarantee is the pure egalitarian solution which should not be muddied with economic or development ideas. Irrigation, crop diversification, rural infrastructure, trees and ponds are all plan programmes. EGS must stand alone, not polluted by such mundane considerations.It is interesting that the Congress president spoke on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill with reference to the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana. The concept of agro-climatic planning was operationalised by teams of scientists, bankers, agro-economists, farm leaders, NGOs at the level of around three to five districts in the late eighties. It was after this that concepts like watershed development, crop diversification and so on became the metaphor. When the then Planning Commission presented to Parliament an agro-climatic plan at the instance of the then PM, it was also reflecting his serious concern about the employment issue. In 1989 when the two earlier employment programmes (NREP and RLEGP) were merged into the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana an attempt was made to permit local communities to undertake the kind of land development and water management works which were central to the efforts of turning around the sub-regional agro-economies. The manual of the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana clearly brought out these intentions by saying that the renovation of important community works such as irrigation tanks was permitted. “Similarly, items like land shaping, field channels, etc. on private lands which are part of a project to improve the productivity of an area taken as a system of land and water management (both in watersheds and command areas) can be undertaken”. The need for work and the late eighties equivalent of sixty rupees a day were all developed then and surface with regularity since.On October 12 1989, with Rajiv Gandhi the prime minister, it was announced in Parliament in a statement on agriculture: “During the next five years irrigation waters will be made available on an assured basis to an additional one crore hectares of land in the command areas of irrigation projects. The authorities will be held responsible for reaching water to farmers in assured quantities and at the right time. Also, ten lakh tubewells and dugwells are to be constructed every year. And five million hectares will be covered annually for the programme of desilting and maintenance of village tanks, beels, bunds and ponds. Second, the productivity of un-irrigated land is to be enhanced through effective watershed development and in situ moisture conservation. This programme will extend to 50 lakh hectares during the Eighth Plan.” There was to be a sustainable agricultural programme and empowerment to the local bodies. Mistakes would be made, but they would be corrected in the vision which was for the long term.For some time, this integration was followed through, for example in the innovative Rozgar Yojana, but was soon given up by the government. Later, structural adjustment packages declared that the eighties was a period without a vision of operational reform strategies, a metaphor very common with page three journalists these days. The employment schemes were separated from the growth strategies and both atrophied. Employment policies have to be integrated with the growth process. We know that grain golas succeed, because labour is involved from the beginning in productive works with a guarantee of food. Tree planting and care succeeds if the adivasi’s immediate need of grain is met.Otherwise there will not be enough money, the wage rate can be below the poverty line and corruption will remain because there will not be a constituency for the products of labour. Jean Dreze is to be supported in his mission to reduce corruption through the right to information. But mobilisation through information is a slow process and if at the local level we develop stakeholders who have an economic interest in outcomes there will be additional powerful forces at play to overcome corruption. When a village is involved in building the road, it sees to it that the material used is good and the leakages are minimised. It is only if stakeholders are involved that employment programmes will succeed.
