India job guarantee Act emerging as ray of hope in global meltdown
Intro: A pioneering piece of legislation that recognises work as a fundamental right and guarantees 100 days employment a year to those in rural areas who demand work is emerging as a ray of hope for India’s poor, who have been left even more vulnerable by the aftershocks of the global financial crisis.
Madhvi Madka, from the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, has one thing in common with business tycoons across the globe. He is part of the construction sector that has been crippled by the global meltdown. He is no real estate shark who had to tighten his purse strings due to the worldwide crisis but a daily-wage earner hit severally by the slowdown in construction. Hailing from a tribal community in the Dantewada district, Madka sustains his family of five by selling forest produce and other agricultural activities in his remote village of Chingawaram. But the meagre income is enough for only four months in a year.
As a sole bread-winner in the family, Madka would supplement his income by travelling to the city for the rest of the year to work as a casual construction worker. Over the past year, however, Madka has failed to find work in the cities. “I failed to find any daily-wage jobs though I looked very hard for many months,” he says. Though he does not know exactly what has led to this sudden turn of fortunes but he is not alone. For India, which is home to about 320 million people living on less than one dollar a day, which is more than the entire population of the US, the aftershocks of the global meltdown have impacted beyond the formal space and shaken up the country’s huge informal economy. The many newly unemployed are not just BPO workers but migrant workers, often short-term migrants with casual contracts whose very existence tends to be ignored by official statistics but whose cheap labour subsidies growth.
But Madka and his family have found a shock absorber in form of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), popularly known as the job guarantee Act. The legislation is fast emerging as a safety net for the poorest of the poor who cannot find work on account of the meltdown. After failing to find work in the city, when Madka returned home he came to know about his right to work under the NREGA and how to access it from an awareness generation programme that was conducted in his village through technical support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which is supporting the implementation of NREGA in India.
“At the meet I learned that through the NREGA I could get daily wages from the government to develop my own land,” said Madka, who then came up with a plan to construct a pond on his agricultural plot through NREGA. Not only was the pond a sound plan for the future of his family but they also received Rs.7,300 as NREGA wages.
Madka’s planning paid off. Today, the pond not only waters his field and cattle; it is also used for rearing fish. Selling the fish provides his family with an extra income. He is also able to grow vegetables all year around and sell them to the neighboring markets. The bonus is that the economic crisis has inflated the prices of vegetables. Madka proudly deposits his earnings in a bank account opened under NREGA. Notified on 7 September 2005, NREGA marks a paradigm shift from previous wage employment programmes with a rights-based approach that makes the Government of India legally accountable to provide employment for up to 100 days to those who demand it.
UNDP in India has been an integral partner to the government in the implementation of the scheme and has been playing an important role in strengthening the government’s capacity for better implementation. UNDP has helped set-up a Technical Secretariat, constituting various experts in monitoring, training, communications, and others to support the government. The support provided by UNDP in generating awareness about the act, the rights it provides and its benefits among beneficiaries – present and prospective – has proved to be crucial in generating demand for work. UNDP-supported innovative technology solutions like smart cards, biometric devices and ATMs are being field tested to ensure transparency in payment of wages and to improve digitization of NREGA information on a real-time basis. UNDP support is also being provided for effective monitoring and greater transparency in the implementation of the programme.
Madka hopes that other residents in the village who have returned due to the recession can learn from his experience and look to the NREGA as a security blanket in these difficult times. Here is hoping that his views are shared by many more (source :http://www.undp.org.in)
Intro: A pioneering piece of legislation that recognises work as a fundamental right and guarantees 100 days employment a year to those in rural areas who demand work is emerging as a ray of hope for India’s poor, who have been left even more vulnerable by the aftershocks of the global financial crisis.
Madhvi Madka, from the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, has one thing in common with business tycoons across the globe. He is part of the construction sector that has been crippled by the global meltdown. He is no real estate shark who had to tighten his purse strings due to the worldwide crisis but a daily-wage earner hit severally by the slowdown in construction. Hailing from a tribal community in the Dantewada district, Madka sustains his family of five by selling forest produce and other agricultural activities in his remote village of Chingawaram. But the meagre income is enough for only four months in a year.
As a sole bread-winner in the family, Madka would supplement his income by travelling to the city for the rest of the year to work as a casual construction worker. Over the past year, however, Madka has failed to find work in the cities. “I failed to find any daily-wage jobs though I looked very hard for many months,” he says. Though he does not know exactly what has led to this sudden turn of fortunes but he is not alone. For India, which is home to about 320 million people living on less than one dollar a day, which is more than the entire population of the US, the aftershocks of the global meltdown have impacted beyond the formal space and shaken up the country’s huge informal economy. The many newly unemployed are not just BPO workers but migrant workers, often short-term migrants with casual contracts whose very existence tends to be ignored by official statistics but whose cheap labour subsidies growth.
But Madka and his family have found a shock absorber in form of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), popularly known as the job guarantee Act. The legislation is fast emerging as a safety net for the poorest of the poor who cannot find work on account of the meltdown. After failing to find work in the city, when Madka returned home he came to know about his right to work under the NREGA and how to access it from an awareness generation programme that was conducted in his village through technical support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which is supporting the implementation of NREGA in India.
“At the meet I learned that through the NREGA I could get daily wages from the government to develop my own land,” said Madka, who then came up with a plan to construct a pond on his agricultural plot through NREGA. Not only was the pond a sound plan for the future of his family but they also received Rs.7,300 as NREGA wages.
Madka’s planning paid off. Today, the pond not only waters his field and cattle; it is also used for rearing fish. Selling the fish provides his family with an extra income. He is also able to grow vegetables all year around and sell them to the neighboring markets. The bonus is that the economic crisis has inflated the prices of vegetables. Madka proudly deposits his earnings in a bank account opened under NREGA. Notified on 7 September 2005, NREGA marks a paradigm shift from previous wage employment programmes with a rights-based approach that makes the Government of India legally accountable to provide employment for up to 100 days to those who demand it.
UNDP in India has been an integral partner to the government in the implementation of the scheme and has been playing an important role in strengthening the government’s capacity for better implementation. UNDP has helped set-up a Technical Secretariat, constituting various experts in monitoring, training, communications, and others to support the government. The support provided by UNDP in generating awareness about the act, the rights it provides and its benefits among beneficiaries – present and prospective – has proved to be crucial in generating demand for work. UNDP-supported innovative technology solutions like smart cards, biometric devices and ATMs are being field tested to ensure transparency in payment of wages and to improve digitization of NREGA information on a real-time basis. UNDP support is also being provided for effective monitoring and greater transparency in the implementation of the programme.
Madka hopes that other residents in the village who have returned due to the recession can learn from his experience and look to the NREGA as a security blanket in these difficult times. Here is hoping that his views are shared by many more (source :http://www.undp.org.in)
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