Jambhla’s villagers live every dark cliche of the other India. The only road to the village of Thane’s Kathkari tribe, deep in the Sahyadri mountains on the Maharashtra-Dadra Nagar Haveli border, is unfinished and only walkable. No house has a phone or drinking water supply, a handful have electric meters. The most educated villager is a Std IX dropout and 100-odd households send their children to just one primary school.After decades of child malnutrition, the government responded last year by building an anganwadi centre which is yet to be finished and has minimum supplies. The ‘rescue centre’ for malnourished children is 4 km away. The only harvest here is a rain-fed crop of rice or millet and villagers have little to do for the rest of the year.Jambhla is emblematic of villages in 200 districts across the country which will see the Rs 17,600-crore first phase of the Centre’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme starting in February, inspired by Maharashtra’s 28-year-old Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS). Jambhla is also emblematic of the corruption in the EGS — fake muster rolls including payments to the dead, which the state government is probing after the Express reported it on January 12.When the Express examined two EGS rolls of works drawn up by the Public Works Department (PWD) from January and February 2005, it found that the PWD had cited 30 days of work and Rs 1,35,427 and Rs 1,79,467 as payments respectively to Jambhla’s families. Villagers say they have never worked on either project.The rolls cite ‘improvement work’ over two 1-km stretches on a taluka road running north through Jawhar. The ‘workplace’ cited on the January roll is cited as Dabheri, a village 4 km away and February’s work claims to have taken place at Gondpada, over 9 km away.Bhaskar Morgha figures on the muster, with a thumb impression as proof of a Rs 1,140 payment, but wife Lata, village anganwadi worker and one of Jambhla’s few literate women, says: ‘‘My mister signs his name in English. He never gives his angthi.’’ Bhaskar, a class 9 dropout, signed to prove his point, as did Lakshya Dangte to whom the roll assigns a thumb impression for Rs 1,040 payment.Says a senior IAS officer who’s probed Maharashtra’s EGS implementation: ‘‘The fact is most villagers never get to see the actual muster roll.’’‘‘Raosahebs (officials) never show us the muster roll,’’ says Dangte, a marginal farmer who’s studied till Std III. ‘‘If we ask what wage they are putting on it, they threaten to remove us from the work,’’ he adds. ‘‘Rs 50 to 55 is what we get,’’ adds Sakari Akne, arguing she’s never seen a Rs 96 daily wage which is what she gets, on paper.
