In model Maharashtra, the dead are paid to siphon off job funds

But The Indian Express obtained muster rolls from PWD officials under the Right to Information Act and went to Bopdari to find that Ganga got no money—he had killed himself a year earlier, in 2004.

His widow Navshi and her two children cannot afford as much as a photo to remember him. Nobody in the family can read or write, so they cannot confirm his date of death. But in the taluka office at Jawhar, the death certificate is clear: Ganga died on September 19, 2004.

Ganga’s road was to offer a lifeline to the area’s poorest villagers under Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme, or the Rozgar Hami Yojana, a 28-year-old programme that is now the blueprint for the world’s largest public jobs programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

Due to be implemented next month, the Rs 40,000-crore nationwide programme is the UPA’s showpiece social safety net aimed at sustaining the poor.

But a reality check in the areas where Maharashtra’s annual Rs 1,228-crore budget—funded by a special cess—is being spent reveals how official fraud has unravelled the scheme.

In Maharashtra, the EGS department enjoys its own minister, while a host of departments, especially PWD, Agriculture and Forest officials are entrusted with EGS funds. But no department accepts responsibility. The beneficiaries are so poor, accountability doesn’t exist.

Barely 170-180 km from Mumbai, Thane’s northern Jawhar and Mokhada talukas are among the state’s poorest: upto 75 per cent of its families live well below the poverty line set at a monthly family income of Rs 1660, and literacy is a Bihar-like 44 to 51 per cent. There are no industries, child malnutrition is rife, even leading to deaths, and livelihoods are fragile—especially after the 4-5 month kharif period—in these rice and ragi farms draped across the Sahyadri ranges.

The role of the EGS in keeping them going has common dubious traits as well: forged rolls, inflated expenditures and payments, including to the dead, infirm, even government employees. And above all, no access to work documents despite clear rules since 1982 that they must be displayed publicly. It also confirms the siphoning of EGS money unearthed last year by now-transferred Solapur Collector Manisha Verma.For example, the Bopdari-Chandoshi road roll on which the dead Ganga features also has the names of people who shouldn’t be there: like government employees. There’s the anganwadi worker Jayawanti Jabar, village watchman Navshu Ghatal and Forest Department guard Kashiram Ghatal, all of whom said they never worked on the scheme.

‘‘I am here from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon,’’ said Jabar, in the village’s anganwadi, handing out plates of khichdi to infants sprawled out on an unfinished floor. ‘‘What is my name doing on the rozgar hamir?’’

The roll has ink blobs supposed to be their thumb impressions, with payment details: Rs 997 to Rs 1008 each. They are literate and signed their names in Marathi for the paper.

‘‘I have never worked on an EGS scheme in my whole life’’ said a bewildered Ghatal writing his name; his name appears on three separate PWD rolls with similar payments and thumb impressions.

Ganga—among the 51,939 people in Thane whom the state claims received EGS work each day of February—isn’t the only dead person whom the PWD claims to have paid for doing EGS work.

• Three km north in Ruighar village, migrant labourer Sitaram Ghatal sat outside his hut and examined a Rs 1.45 lakh muster roll. It records Rs 1,294 paid to his dead father Sonu Raoji Garel for 13 days of work in February.

‘‘My father passed away two years back in his sleep,’’ said Sitaram. ‘‘We had to postpone my younger brother’s marriage to 2004.’’ The roll also attributes a payment of Rs 1294 to Sitaram, certified by an ink blob. The Standard IV dropout signed his name for us.

• Dhiresh Janu Garel was supposedly paid Rs 1175. His sister Suman says her brother died in 2003 after falling from a tree, and delayed medical attention.

‘‘His wife’s name (Sevanti, for a payment of Rs 1162) also features on this muster. She left the village for her home in Gujarat following my brother’s death and doesn’t stay here anymore. How could she do this work in February?’’, asks Suman.

In fact the dead Dhiresh and his absentee wife, Sevanti simultaneously appear on another work—the 900 mt to 2.1 km stretch of the Bopdari Chandoshi road. The workdates: the very same fortnight in February as the other roll. Wages of Rs 1163 are claimed to have been paid to each of them in a Rs 1.56 lakh muster roll.

• Sixty km away in Mokhada taluka’s Gaimukhpada village, on a November 2004 muster roll for the construction of a 1 km village road on which the PWD claims to have spent over Rs 10 lakh, five members of the Raut family feature, including their mother, Dwarki who supposedly received Rs 1100 as wages.

Shown the roll, the family takes down her photo. She died in September. ‘‘This payment is a fake,’’ says Soma Raut. ‘‘My wife had passed away from a stomach ailment.’’

• Sundari Santu Chaudhary, a great grandmother of uncertain age, paid Rs 1,124 for nine days of stone crushing. Is she here? Yes, says the family. They carry her out for a photograph. She cannot walk.