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Journalism of Courage
The Rural Development Ministry is in the process of finalising names and reconstituting the Central Employment Guarantee Council,responsible for monitoring and evaluation of MGNREGA implementation. According to the Act,CEGC is headed by the Rural Development Minister and comprises both official and non-official members.
The CEGC is also expected to prepare annual reports about the Acts implementation,which is then laid before Parliament.
The last CEGC was notified on June 2011 and the term of non-official members expired a year later.
While the Act stipulates that the council meets at least two times a year,the last CEGC meeting was held in December 2011. A meeting of the council was scheduled for March 5 but it was later cancelled.
Activist and former CEGC member Jean Dreze has criticized the government for evading accountability mechanisms. The state of the council is symptomatic of the state of NREGA. The law provides for powerful accountability mechanisms,but most of them have been disabled by the central or state governments. The government is least interested in making itself accountable, Dreze said.
The CAG had last month slammed the council for doing little in terms of monitoring the scheme.
In the six years of its existence,a few council members conducted just 13 field visits and the council had not put in place an effective system of monitoring and evaluation, the CAG had stated. The CAG audit report,however,pertains to the period between April 2007 to March 2012,three months before the CEGC became defunct.
Dreze said the council may have been slack in its initial years. Even in the initial years,the CEGC was not very active and failed in its basic mandate. Nevertheless,it did useful work from time to time,such as field visits to various states followed by constructive interactions with state governments, he said.
The CEGC had formed six working groups on wages,transparency and accountability,planning,scope of works,equity and social security,and management issues involved in the implementation at the grassroots level. Former CEGC members included MGNREGA activists like Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey.
