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Journalism of Courage
AS observers in India watch how the Centre8217;s showpiece rural job guarantee scheme unfolds, a village in central Maharashtra is displaying how villages can skillfully use it to turn around insecure subsistence economies and arrest distress migration to the city.
Ahmednagar district8217;s Hivre Bazaar has used the Maharashtra8217;s Employment Guarantee Scheme EGS8212;the 1978 state program was the blueprint for the new national law8212;to conserve their rainwater and soil, boost agriculture and lift personal incomes. And here, the increasing irrelevance of a job guarantee law is the best testament to its success.
About 20 lakh families across 12 state districts have signed up for the program since its early February launch, with 1.3 lakh of these in Maharashtra8217;s largest rural district, Ahmednagar. But in this drought-prone belt, east of the Sahyadris, not one of Hivre Bazaar8217;s 180-odd families have signed up yet.
LIKE the EGS, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act NREGA is promising rural India the dual benefits of employment and building communal assets, setting aside about 17,000 crores for the 200 districts chosen for its first phase.
But as numerous observers warn, failure is easy with officials on the ground and village elite joining hands to siphon off allocations. But Hivre Bazaar has bucked this trend to ensure that the program doesn8217;t just remain a social safety net but combined with some inspired leadership and well-thought out measures, can help families climb out of poverty.
Sarpanch Popatrao Pawar spearheaded the change. The genial commerce post-graduate chucked club cricket in Mumbai to return to his village in 1988, and set about tackling its water woes.
In 1994, villagers called together all departments8212;12 different agencies handle EGS allocations in Maharashtra from Agriculture and Forest to PWD and the Zilla Parishad8212;and chalked out a plan of watershed conservation.
The panchayat also laid down certain ground rules to optimise returns: EGS work would not be viewed as labour for a weekly wage, but had to be of high quality; the village negotiated a five year plan that would govern EGS as opposed to each state department doing fragmented work each year. Farmer Mohan Chattar shows some of the results. 8216;8216;We started out in 1995 with an EGS work under Forest Department officials, building these contour trenches across the village hillocks and planting trees to arrest runoff.8217;8217;
Working with Agriculture and Zilla Parishad funds, over the next three years, the 947 hectares of land were covered by an intricate network of check dams, drainage networks and percolation tanks. Villagers studied and suggested appropriate sites. Works were backed up by self-imposed bans to conserve water.
So, there are acres of potato and onion fields today but none of the water-intensive sugarcane; to prevent, groundwater decline, water from the 16 tubewells only services households, not irrigation. A decade back, households survived on a single rain-fed crop of jowar or bajra, and then began migrating for work. Today, year-around water has helped families diversify into a second8212;sometimes third, when rainfall is good8212;horticulture crop.
Aiming urban markets like Ahmednagar and Pune, villagers have already sold onions to the tune of Rs 1 crore this season, and now are working on a scheme to market vegetables and milk under the brand name of 8216;Hivre Bazaar8217;
The village8217;s wealth is most visible in the construction of one-storey pucca houses fast replacing spare huts, with annual per capita income rising in the past decade from Rs 830 to Rs 24,000.
THE turnaround8217;s most dramatic for the village8217;s reverse migrants8212; mostly OBC families8212;like Sunderbai Gaekwad, who, leaving the village to work as a domestic help, living in a Ulhasnagar slum, returned a decade ago.
The Gaekwads now are sharecroppers on 5 acres of land, were harvesting their jowar crop when we caught up with them. In December they did a Rs 25,000 onion business . 8216;8216;I8217;m never leaving again,8217;8217; says Sunderbai emotionally, who8217;s now saving money to buy land backed by a panchayat that wants no family below the poverty line by 2007.
Meanwhile Pawar says gram sabhas8212;NREGA is entrusting half its funds to village panchayats8212;have to carefully draw a community agenda that builds incremental gains, as opposed to that of officials who might care little beyond notching up targets of 100 workdays in each village. Hivre Bazaar has fought such coarse bureaucratese: 8216;8216;When we did plantation work on our hillocks, government officials came for an audit since we finished the work in Rs 78,000 instead of the allocated Rs 1.3 lakh. They weren8217;t interested whether any tree had survived, only producing vouchers for the assigned allocation.8217;8217;
Chattar adds, 8216;8216;Two EGS ponds dug here in 1972 and 1983 have 80 per cent leakage since villagers didn8217;t perceive a stake in the work. As opposed the 70-odd lakh spent before, the Rs 42 lakh spent in the past decade is still yielding returns.8217;8217;
And this efficient use of the job guarantee program has rendered it superfluous now, with no Hivre Bazaar family yet signing up for NREGA: 8216;8216;Employment guarantee work cannot go on forever, a village will run out of sites after a point,8217;8217; laughs Pawar. 8216;8216;Planned properly, it must take rural Indians out of their poverty.8217;8217;
