Look at the very last paragraph, with my highlighting.
While I like to hope for it to happen, having
observed desi-citizenry, or more precisely its
intelligentsia, one that holds the powers for
change, it would care less. So good luck and say
a prayer to your favorite god, for that has a
far better chance ofd delivering than
desi-intelligentsia or its 'rising middle-class'
involvement or care.
cm
Welfare's Willing Executioners
Cholera's not all that's killing people in
India's hunger capital. Staggering corruption in
the Orissa NREGS has done the poor enough harm
too, says PARSHURAM RAI
OF THE 1.4 billion people who face chronic hunger
world over, one in three is an Indian. Every
third Indian goes to bed without food; more than
10,000 of our compatriots die of hunger each day.
So massive a scale of abject poverty is
unconscionable in a fast-growing economy with a
rising number of dollar millionaires. When
confronted with such disparity, the traditional
explanation of poverty in terms of low incomes
and a poor economy becomes increasingly
irrelevant. It is difficult to disagree with Lord
Meghnad Desai when he says that economic poverty
in India is inextricably linked to the poverty of
politics - bad governance and corruption. It is
not the poor state of the economy or the lack of
funds that is killing about 40 lakh Indians every
year, it is the cancer of corruption and the
colonial character of the Indian bureaucracy.
Dregs of the NREGS
Rs 733 crore was spent
on the NREGS in Orissa
in 2006-07
Of this, the CEFS
report claims that
NREGS executing
officials siphoned
off over Rs 500 crore
The money would have
bought 10 lakh
families two meals a
day for six months
Rural Development
Minister Raghuvansh
Prasad Singh
recently denied the
report any veracity
However, on September
17, a day after his
previous statement,
Singh said the CAG
would probe the
'alleged irregularities'
India currently has four major schemes in
operation that aim at fighting hunger and food
insecurity: the Public Distribution System (PDS),
the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS),
the Mid-day Meal Scheme (MDM) and, most
importantly, the National Rural Employment
Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). Very few Indians would
ever have to go without food if we could just
ensure that these schemes were corruption-free,
in particular the PDS and the NREGS. But what is
their actual performance on the ground? According
to a recent report on the Ministry of Consumer
Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, "Last year
alone, Rs 11,336.98 crore worth of food grain
that the government is supposed to distribute to
the needy at subsidised prices found its way into
the market illegally. Every year, India's poor
are cheated out of 53.3 percent of wheat and 39
percent of rice meant for them There is
largescale diversion of PDS grain across India
Exceptions apart, the poor in India simply can't
trust the government to deliver them food
supplies." (The Times of India, September 17,
2007)
One of the most horrifying examples of the
governing class' brutal theft of money meant for
the poor is to be found in Orissa, which is among
the poorest states in the country. A survey I
headed conducted by the Delhibased Centre for
Environment and Food Security (CEFS) across 100
Orissa villages has found that of the Rs 733
crore spent under the NREGS during 2006-07, over
Rs 500 crore, or around 70 percent, has been
siphoned off and misappropriated by officials of
the executing agencies. Moreover, as against the
claims of the Orissa government that no needy
household in the state's 19 NREGS districts had
been denied wage employment and that each such
household had been given an average of 57 days of
wage employment under the NREGS, the CEFS study
has revealed that a large number of impoverished
households had been denied not only jobs but even
job cards, and that not more than five days' wage
employment on average had been given to any of
these families in the 19 districts.
To put Rs 500 crore of siphoned NREGS funds in
perspective, this amount of money would have
given about 90 days of wage employment to about
10 lakh severely impoverished families. Each of
these families would have got Rs 5,000 as wages.
This amount would have given each family two
subsistence meals a day for four to six months;
it would have supplied each family one meal a day
for an entire year. The scale of this callousness
takes it beyond the level of just another
financial scam - the Orissa bureaucracy has
robbed 10 lakh chronically hungry families of a
meal a day for a whole year.
DURING THE last two months, hundreds of adivasis
in Rayagada, Koraput and Kalahandi districts have
died due to "consumption of contaminated water
and rotten food" and "hunger and severe food
insecurity". The CEFS study, however, leads one
to believe that the cholera epidemic that is
killing hundreds of adivasis in Orissa's KBK
(Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput) region is only a
ymptom and a byproduct of the corruption which
has colonised and crippled all the vital organs
of the Orissa administration. When all
anti-poverty programmes in the region have been
hijacked and converted into money-minting
machines for Orissa's babus, who then is the real
killer of Orissa's adivasis?
Is there any connection between the
misappropriation of Rs 500 crore and the hundreds
of cholera deaths among Orissa's adivasis? On the
surface, the link is tenuous. Scratch a little
deeper and it turns direct. Most of these
adivasis live in semi-starvation, which cripples
their immune system, making them vulnerable to a
host of diseases. In the KBK region, for the
better part of the rainy season, a majority of
adivasis have hardly any food to eat and they
survive on mango kernel gruel, wild leaves and
vegetables.
The NREGS was launched precisely to end this kind
of dehumanising poverty. Unfortunately, Orissa's
babus have converted even this historic
employment guarantee scheme into nothing but an
income guarantee scheme for themselves. The
current level of hunger, poverty and deprivation
in the KBK region is as deep and demeaning as it
has ever been, despite its receiving the highest
per capita allocation of funds under the NREGS
anywhere in the country. On the Human Development
Index, many sub- Saharan villages would fare
better than most KBK villages.
In 2001, reports of starvation deaths from
Panasguda, Gottigudda and Bilamal villages in
Rayagada district's Kashipur block impelled then
Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to visited them to
offer relief. Six years later, most households in
these villages are still living on the verge of
starvation. For the better part of the rainy
season, they still have to make a choice between
starvation and eating mango kernel gruel.
Panasguda and Gottigudda have not even received
job cards. Some households have been given job
cards in Bilamal, but even they got only two or
three days of work under the NREGS. A Bilamal
family which had lost four of its members to
starvation in 2001 has not received a job card
till date. At least eight people are reported to
have died in Bilamal in the last two months. Most
of these deaths are essentially hunger-deaths,
but it is convenient for bureaucrats to declare
them "cholera deaths".
The largest number of cholera deaths have been
reported from Kashipur. The CEFS study surveyed
30 villages in this block and found that there
had been an open loot of NREGS funds in all the
villages where the scheme was executed. A similar
loot of NREGS funds was found in Laxmipur and
Nandpur blocks of Koraput district and in
Thuamulrampur block of Kalahandi. All these
blocks are now witness to a naked dance of death
scripted and choreographed by the callous and
corrupt bureaucracy of Orissa.
ABJECT POVERTY and chronic hunger manufactured by
a corrupt bureaucracy are the main reasons behind
these tragic deaths. Where has the Orissa
government spent the Rs 733 crore it claimed to
have spent on the NREGS? These hungry adivasis
deserve at least an answer in the 60th
anniversary of India's Independence.
The CEFS survey report was formally released on
August 17, yet so far the Orissa government has
maintained a studied silence on its findings,
apart from ordering a National Institute of Rural
Development survey of NREGS work. Most shocking,
however, is the silence of Orissa's main
opposition party - the Congress. That the oldest
political party of the world's largest democracy
could not be bothered to respond to so massive a
theft of public money is perhaps the most
shameful part of Orissa's NREGS tragedy. All
other opposition parties have demanded a special
session of the Assembly to discuss the scam; even
the BJP, a partner in the state's ruling
coalition, has said that the NREGS in Orissa had
failed miserably. In the speeches of the
politicians, adivasis and Dalits are routinely
claimed to have the first charge on the country's
resources. In reality, that charge is owned by
the babus, who are the main beneficiaries of
every anti-poverty programme this country has
ever devised.
Only a vigilant citizenry can shake up the
corrupt bureaucracy by making it accountable for
its acts of omission and commission. Unless
public servants are afraid of being prosecuted,
their corruption will continue to thrive, and
adivasis and Dalits will continue to die like
flies, unnoticed and unmourned by a "rising
India".
Rai is director, Centre for Environment and Food Security
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