The Hindu
Dec 31, 2004
Opinion - Leader Page Articles
UNEMPLOYMENT GUARANTEE BILL
By Jean Drèze
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill,
2004, leaves labourers at the mercy of the
benevolence of the state.
THE NATIONAL Rural Employment Guarantee Bill 2004
was tabled in Parliament on December 21. This is,
in principle, a welcome step. Unfortunately, the
Bill is so watered down that it defeats the
purpose of an Employment Guarantee Act.
The main purpose of an Employment Guarantee Act
is to enable people to claim from the state a
basic aspect of their constitutional right to
work. For this to happen, the Act must give them
effective and durable entitlements. It should aim
at empowering the disadvantaged, and include
extensive safeguards against any dereliction of
duty by the authorities. This is the spirit in
which a draft Act had been prepared by concerned
citizens and revised by the National Advisory
Council (NAC).
The Bill tabled in Parliament earlier this month
is a travesty of the NAC draft. It has been
extensively reworked from the point of view of a
bureaucrat who is anxious to minimise the
responsibility of the state. Now the Government
can modify the rules of the game at any time.
An essential feature of the NAC draft is that it
was based on the twin principles of universality
and self-selection. All households were eligible
to apply for work, and the Act was to be extended
to the whole of rural India within five years.
Eligibility criteria were deemed unnecessary
since the willingness to perform casual manual
labour at the minimum wage is itself a strong
indicator of need. The effectiveness of the
self-selection mechanism is borne out by India's
long experience with relief works.
The Bill tabled in Parliament involves a radical
departure from universality and self-selection.
To start with, there is no guarantee of
time-bound extension of the Act to the whole of
rural India. The guarantee of employment applies
only "in such rural area in the State and for
such period as may be notified by the Central
Government." In other words, the guarantee can be
withdrawn anywhere at any time.
In a similar vein, the Bill allows both the
employment guarantee and the unemployment
allowance to be restricted to "poor households."
How are "poor households" to be identified? The
Bill defines poor households as those below the
poverty line in the relevant financial year, but
this is little more than a tautology, devoid of
any practical guidance. In practice, State
Governments are likely to restrict the employment
guarantee schemes to households with a BPL card.
But the BPL (below poverty line) list is known to
be highly unreliable, and this restriction is
bound to exclude many poor households from the
scheme. This would defeat the main purpose of the
employment guarantee, namely, to protect rural
households from economic insecurity. Further,
this approach is likely to intensify the
pernicious social division between BPL and
non-BPL households.
For good measure, the Bill dispenses with minimum
wages. In the NAC draft, labourers were entitled
to the statutory minimum wage of agricultural
labourers in the relevant State. In the Bill
tabled in Parliament, this can be superseded by a
central norm, without restriction ("the Central
Government, may, by notification, specify the
wage rate for the purposes of this Act").
Aside from the dubious legal and ethical
justification for paying less than the statutory
minimum wage, this provides the Central
Government with another opportunity to backtrack
at any time if it so desires: the demand for work
can be made arbitrarily low through suitable
reduction of the wage rate.
The tendency to make the Act "safe" for the state
can also be seen in many other aspects of the
Bill. For instance, the transparency provisions
have been severely diluted. In the NAC draft,
muster rolls and other records were to be made
available for public scrutiny, either free of
charge or at cost price. By contrast, the Bill
states that these documents will be available on
demand "after paying such fee as may be specified
in the Scheme."
Similarly, the basic features of the "employment
guarantee schemes" to be initiated by State
Governments, and the entitlements of labourers
under these schemes, have been shifted from the
body of the Act to a pair of appended
"Schedules." These Schedules can be modified by
notification of the Central Government, without
amending the Act itself. This gives the Central
Government sweeping powers to derail the schemes
or to reduce the entitlements of labourers.
The bottom line is that the National Rural
Employment Guarantee Bill 2004 leaves labourers
at the mercy of the benevolence of the state. A
benign state could certainly use this legislation
with good effect to provide massive work
opportunities to the rural poor. However, the
state's discretionary powers under the Act can
also be used at any time to phase out the whole
project. Trusting the benevolence of the state in
this context would be the triumph of hope over
experience.
This is not to say that the struggle for an
effective Employment Guarantee Act should be
given up. In principle, the Bill can still be
repaired and passed in the Budget Session of
Parliament. However, this is unlikely to happen
without a strong expression of popular demand for
a full-fledged Employment Guarantee Act. There is
an interesting challenge here for the labour
movement and all organisations committed to the
right to work.
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