Solapur146;s sieve

Evidence of the Rs 9 crore job scheme Employment Guarantee Scheme fraud in Maharashtra8217;s Solapur district has serious lessons for the C...

Evidence of the Rs 9 crore job scheme Employment Guarantee Scheme fraud in Maharashtra8217;s Solapur district has serious lessons for the Centre. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill is set to become an Act in the current session of Parliament. In Solapur, the number of works underway far exceeded the number of works approved. In a number of cases, signatures were forged and muster rolls manipulated.

Before going ahead with the Bill, the government must provide a full and detailed assessment of the employment guarantee scheme that was implemented in the 150 backward districts last year as an interim step towards an employment guarantee regime. It provided 100 days employment to poor households on

asset-creating public works programmes and Rs 2020 crore were sanctioned for it. What are the results in terms of people employed, assets created, poverty reduced, and expenses involved? The PM owes the nation an assurance that there were no leakages or corruption, that the design of the scheme worked, and that it is satisfied with the quality of the productive assets created. Until such an assurance is provided, the government has no right to go ahead and extend the scheme to the entire country.

The corruption in Solapur points to the biggest problem that India is going to face if the Rural Employment Guarantee Bill becomes law. Estimates of its cost vary from Rs 40,000 crore to Rs 150,000 crore, depending on how many of the country8217;s poor participate in it. No money is added to this to take into account the corruption that can happen because of its open-endedness. The government cannot, under the law, say it will spend only so much and no more. It has to keep on supplying funds as long as someone can show that money is being spent on employment generating schemes. In this context it is extremely important that foolproof ways must first be devised to ensure that leakages from the system are not allowed to add to the already daunting costs of the scheme.