I'm encouraged that a variety of news outlets have been covering government poverty alleviation schemes in India. I'd like to highlight another article from the New York Times, "Smart Step to Help India's Rural Poor." I agree with the author, Akash Kapur who observes that there's something different about the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) as compared to other poverty alleviation programs in India's past and present.
NREGA is a government work scheme that's been around since 2005. It promises 60 inr per day of work and 100 days of work a year for men and women below the poverty line (same wage for men and women). In order to qualify for the scheme, all candidates must register with their panchayat (village counsel) who administer the program at the local level. Qualified workers each receive a card which they need to keep to record days worked and wages received. The type of work is unskilled manual labor in projects deemed important for rural development - roads, wells, school buildings, etc.
I view NREGA as India's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the New Deal institution which employed millions of Americans in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, the WPA, an act of Congress, was the country's largest employer and used its millions of dollars and its massive labor force to bring about many public improvements such as roads, bridges and important buildings. It brought millions of Americans through the unemployment and the hardship of the depression and also, according to some economists, helped the economy on the way to by spurring consumer spending.
WPA employed most of America until the economy recovered by the early 1940s and America entered into World War II, spurring an industrial boom. In the late years of WPA, the program focused on providing vocational training to WPA employees to make them eligible for factory work.
In the ideal world NREGA would function somewhat the same way (without the war), by employing rural India until the rural economy catches up with the rest of India and the private sector can take over. Looking forward, NREGA should start to focus on providing job skills to its workers and not just a wage they become dependent on. Authorities and civil society should work to ensure that all BPL populations have access to NREGA and they they're given their promised amount of work days (which all too often doesn't happen in very rural areas). NREGA, like all public schemes, should be monitored extremely closely to ensure that corruption is limited and jobs and funds reach the people who are in the most need and that the projects truly benefit the community.
NREGA has potential to outdo its 1930's counterpart. With some of the best minds in government being put in charge of implementation, with the impressive reporting and accountibility systems being developed, and taking into account results we've already seen, NREGA just might change rural India. NREGA will be nothing short of revolutionary if it can start providing workers job skills, filling the gap of skilled labor that many analysts claim is retarding growth in India.
Take a look at NREGA's website and you'll already see something different. http://nrega.nic.in/
has an impressive amount of information and data for a government website, even down to the panchayat level and individual card holder level! You can see how many hours an individual worked, when, and how much they were paid. All accounts are published (at least in theory). There's even a section for reporting irregularities and for conducting social audits. And a step further, they've published the results of corruption investigations: http://nrega.nic.in/State_details.pdf
NREGA isn't and won't be without the flaws of any program being implemented on a large scale through the India bureaucracy, but it is an encouraging step to help the rural poor.
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