Civil Society demands food security for all

A number of human rights activists working on right to food issues in fourteen districts gathered in Jaipur on November 9 to discuss the current food insecurity as well as the upcoming enactment of the National Food Security Act.

Most of the participants raised questions about the malfunction of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) ensuring the right to work and right to food due to the underpayment or delayed payment practised by corrupt officials. Moreover, they pointed out that the earmarked payment Rs.100 a day is not enough to manage three meals a day due to soaring food prices. Furthermore, the 100 days-employment is also insufficient since the drought, particularly this year in Rajasthan, has been affecting food security in the village resulting in less harvest and therefore less employment.

In Barmer district, the villagers started selling their job cards issued under NREGA to others. The Job card holders rather decide to migrate to other states, such as Punjab or Gujarat to seek longer employment with better payment. Many of job card holders are less paid than 100 rupees and do not get the full-100 days of employment, which is prevalent in the areas in which the NREGA was launched.

Under the Public Food Distribution System (PDS), the wheat is distributed to the BPL families raging from 10 kilograms (Rajsamand district for instance) to 28 kilograms, which is less than the 35 kilograms earmarked by the state government.

It is said that 278 districts across India have been struck by the worst drought this year. Rajasthan, known as a dessert area, has been affected worse than other states. Despite the fact that most of the districts suffer from drought, the government has till not taken any action. According to the order which resulted from the drought in 2001-02, the district collector has an obligation to have a monthly meeting to discuss counter plans and open the water tank. In addition to the 100 days-employment under the NREGA, the villagers are entitled to get 10 days more during the drought. However, it has been suggested that the government should provide unlimited employment to the villagers during the drought.

The villagers in rural areas who are deprived of the right to work suffer from lack of livelihood and have no choice but to migrate to the city or other states in order to feed their families. The corruption practised by public servants has been leading a failure of the implementation of the government policy on the right to work, which results in constant migration. The migration this year has been promoted by the worsening drought. In addition, it is even more difficult for the migrant family to get benefits from the government services ensuring their rights.

In the context of the worsening status in food security, the civil society groups are complaining against the proposed National Food Security Act which merely ensures the provision of 25 kilograms of food grains to every Below the Poverty Line (BPL) family at three rupees. The groups are concerned that the government may delay its enactment and fulfilment of the National Food Security Act and are demanding immediate guarantees on access to safe and adequate food in various aspects to which the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) also gives its support. The civil society groups will have a rally in Delhi on November 26 to call for the enactment of the National Food Security Act and reflect their demands as below.

1. Enact a Food Entitlements Act immediately

The drought should not be used as an excuse to delay the enactment of a broad based and comprehensive food entitlements act that ensures long term food security for all.

2. Universalise the Public Food Distribution System (PDS)

a. Every resident of this country must be covered by the PDS;
b. Each adult must be entitled to 14 kilograms of cereals per month, along with 1.5 kilograms of pulses and 800 grams of cooking oil;
c. Cereals must include nutritious millets
d. Cereals must be priced at two rupees per kilogram, pulses at 20 rupees and cooking oil at 35 rupees;
e. Decentralise the procurement, storage and distribution of food;
f. Rations cards must be issued in the name of the female head of the household.

3. Follow a "Food First" Policy: Incentivize domestic food production and consumption and revitalize agriculture

a. Stop forcible diversion of land, water and forests from food production. The first call on all natural resources must be for food;
b. No export of food till malnutrition is eradicated;
c. Protect Indian farmers by ensuring no food imports except temporarily during shortages;
d. Fix remunerative prices for food items so that farmers find it viable to produce food;
e. Eliminate the entry of corporate interests and private contractors in food production, the food market and nutrition-related schemes;
f. Immediate moratorium on Genetically Modified (GM) seeds and use of GM food in government food schemes;
g. Ensure access to safe drinking water and sanitation for all.

4. Special protection for excluded and vulnerable groups and in disasters

a. Special protection to vulnerable groups such as the elderly, disabled, female-headed or child-headed households, destitute people, "primitive" and de-notified tribes, urban destitute, etc.;
b. Antyodaya cards which entitle them to PDS items at half the prices of the general population;
c. Additional entitlements such as access to cooked meals, admission for children to residential schools, double quota of all entitlements; one quintal of free food grains etc for them;
d. Pensions at half the statutory minimum wages for the elderly and disabled (ie at an average of around 1,300 rupees per month at the current rate);
e. Special food security policies for migrant workers and urban destitute;
f. Special measures in all emergencies (including starvation and chronic hunger) and natural and man-made disasters.

5. No dilution of Supreme Court orders
The food entitlement act must ensure that legal entitlement and other enabling orders issued by the Supreme Court on the right to food are not diluted in anyway.

6. Put in place an effective grievance redress system

a. Fines and criminal penalties for wrong-doers and compensation for the wronged;
b. Strong in-built transparency mechanism, and mandatory social audits;
c. Accountability must be fixed at all levels.

7. Affirmative action towards people who are socially discriminated

a. At least 50% of jobs for cooks and helpers must be for Dalits, Adivasis (tribes) and members of the minority community;
b. Priority to Dalit, Adivasi and minority community hamlets in the location of Anganwadis (child care centre) and ration shops.

8. Immediate action on hunger, drought and violations

a. Every adult should get employment on demand. NREGA works should be implemented in drought stricken regions without a cap on the number of days. After the commencement of NREGA, public works need to be converged with NREGA, rather than creating a separate machinery and set of rules for relief works;
b. Wages should be fixed at 20% above the state's Statutory Minimum Wage. The current wage freeze must be immediately lifted;
c. Raise PDS entitlement by 50%;
d. Immediate supply of food, water and fodder to alleviate hunger and suffering in the 278 drought and cyclone-affected districts;
e. Mid Day Meals Scheme to all out of school children and MDM should continue during vacations;
f. Ensure full coverage under Antyodaya of all primitive tribal groups, disabled, aged, and other vulnerable groups;
g. Government must immediately redress of complaints of violation of Right to Food Orders and NREGA.

Mr. Ashok, an advisor of the Supreme Court Commission on the right to food, who attended the meeting, explained that the universalization of the PDS to all citizens excluding certain groups like government officials, aims to provide subsidised food grains to all BPL families amounting for more than 70 percent of the total population, whereas the current PDS cover about 35% of the population. He also emphasized that the universalisation to all can reduce the possibility of corruption.

The Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong, which distributed the above report on the Jaipur meeting adds, “The AHRC has been observing the deep-rooted corruption in all government services ensuring people's rights particularly relating to right to food for years by reporting Hunger Alerts. However, further action is required to set up the mechanism to punish corruption which deprives persons of food security”.

The real radicalism of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act

By Mihir Shah

The brutal murder of young Jharkhand activist Lalit Mehta exposes the violent opposition of vested interests deeply threatened by the radical provisions of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).

Lalit Kumar Mehta, full-time activist of Vikas Sahyog Kendra (VSK), was brutally murdered on the 14th of May 2008, on his way home through the Kandra forest. He was 36. Lalit leaves behind his 28-year-old Adivasi wife and their two babies, aged one and three.

The VSK is an Adivasi-led organisation whose activists have worked over the last 15 years in the Palamu district of Jharkhand for secure rights over natural resources and sustainable livelihoods. Palamu typifies the most backward Adivasi hinterlands of India, whose incredible wealth of natural resources is matched only by the deep distress of its people. Drought, poverty and hunger stalk a land where they can easily be overcome. This requires a people-centred, nature-nourishing approach to development, fine-tuned to the needs of each location. For the VSK, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) holds out precisely such a promise.

Young VSK activists like Lalit have been working hard to make NREGA realise its potential. At the time of his murder, Lalit was busy organising social audits of NREGA works. He was murdered just the day before a major audit was scheduled to take place. A CBI enquiry into the death, bringing his assailants to justice and compensation for Lalit's family are the least the government must do to compensate for this incalculable loss. Meanwhile, it would be instructive to try and understand why NREGA work can turn out to be so fraught with danger. The answer lies in the real radicalism of NREGA.

Mainstream discussions on the employment guarantee have been largely dismissive, left, right and centre. The political right views it as yet another meaningless palliative, a relief programme wasting its time on agriculture and rural development, while unnecessarily burdening the fiscal deficit. For it, the answer lies in getting people out of rural areas by focussing on urbanisation and industrialisation. Completely forgetting that these remedies have failed, despite having been tried for over 50 years now. Others, who occupy the centre of the debate, consider it important to address rural distress, especially in view of growing farmers' suicides but suggest that the much more effective way would be direct cash transfers. They argue that the NREGA needlessly complicates mechanisms of delivery. How much simpler it would be to just hand out doles.
As Lalit's tragic death has shown, these observers completely miss the wood for the trees, ignoring the much larger challenge NREGA poses to governance structures in India's hinterlands. For it is a programme based on a constitutional right to demand work, not dependent on the whimsical largesse of the state. At the extreme left of the political spectrum, there are those who suggest that the NREGA is one big conspiracy, a pain-killer so to speak, that seeks only to legitimise the dominant market-based policies of our time. What they fail to see is that the struggle to deepen democracy at the grass-roots must always imaginatively take advantage of spaces opened up by the state, whatever may or may not have been the compulsions or motivation for them to be created in the first place.

Lalit and his work, now much more eloquently before us, help shake off each of these anti-NREGA misconceptions. By revealing the heinous opposition of threatened vested interests, his ultimate sacrifice teaches us a great deal about the massive transformatory potential inherent in the Act. For NREGA programmes visualise a decisive break with the past. Ever since independence, rural development has largely been the monopoly of local contractors, who have emerged as major agents of exploitation of the rural poor, especially women. Almost every aspect of these programmes, including the schedule of rates that is used to measure and value work done, has been tailor-made for local contractors. These people invariably tend to be local power brokers. They implement programmes in a top-down manner, run roughshod over basic human rights, pay workers a pittance and use labour-displacing machinery.

NREGA is poised to change all that. It places a ban on contractors and their machines. It mandates payment of statutory minimum wages and provides various legal entitlements to workers. It visualises the involvement of local people in every decision - whether it be the selection of works and work-sites, the implementation of projects or their social audit. All of this is obviously incompatible with programmes where the main goal was, in effect, the maximisation of profits of the contractor. But even after the enactment of NREGA, things have been slow to change at the grass-roots. Displaying remarkable ingenuity, the old order is already finding ways to sidestep the radical provisions of the Act. Contractors deploy machines with impunity, even as forged muster rolls are filled up with fictitious names and thumb-marks of workers, to show as if the work was done by labour. This is especially the case in States like Jharkhand, which still do not have elected Gram Panchayats.

It is in this context that activists like Lalit become a major threat for local vested interests, all part of the long chain of recipients of sleaze-money siphoned out of NREGA. Jean Dreze, one of the architects of NREGA, who was with him just hours before he died, says that Lalit's work "revealed high levels of corruption involving people in high places." It is evident that these people were sufficiently threatened to feel compelled to silence Lalit's voice. Even as we struggle to come to terms with the immediate loss of a young life full of adventure and exciting possibilities, this is also a moment of deep reflection for all those who continue to believe in the huge change NREGA can bring to rural India.

The question Lalit's death should pose to us is: have we done enough to make it possible for NREGA to realise its enormous potential? Or will the forces of change represented by people like Lalit continue to hopelessly battle the powers-that-be who want business-as-usual in India's rural hinterlands, especially our Adivasi forest areas?

The problem NREGA faces can be stated in very simple terms. Its ostensible purpose is to overthrow the old contractor-raj but it has done little to offer an adequate replacement. Gram Panchayats have been designated the chief implementing agency but they have not been provided with the support structure required to execute the programme. A new bottom-up, people-centred approach to planning of works and social audit is spoken of but the social mobilisers and technical personnel required to make this a reality have not been supplied. The biggest employment programme ever undertaken in human history faces a huge crunch of quality human resources. This calls for a massive national campaign for capacity building of grass-roots workers. The Schedules of Rates remain the same that the contractor-raj used. They underpay labour, especially in earthen watershed works, making a mockery of statutory minimum wages, a legal entitlement under NREGA. They discriminate against women by underpaying or not even recognising specific work done by them.

Development initiative

The sooner the government realises the anachronism of "new wine in old bottles" that the NREGA has become, the better. This is not an old-style famine relief kind of welfare programme. This is a development initiative, chipping in with crucial public investments for creation of durable assets, which can provide the much-needed impetus to private investment in the most backward regions of India. The thrust is on construction of earthen dams, bunds and ponds as part of a watershed development strategy. On this foundation of water security, can be built a sustainable village development plan that includes a rejuvenated agriculture and allied rural livelihoods. For such a programme to be successful needs a new professional support structure. This structure must be mainstreamed within the government system.

Wherever possible, it can also be provided by civil society. Lalit Mehta's organisation Vikas Sahyog Kendra is part of a National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) initiated in 2007. These CSOs, working across 34 districts in 8 States of India, have committed themselves to supporting gram panchayats (GPs) to implement NREGA. They have been formally invited by GPs to help them plan, implement and social audit NREGA work. Consortium partners have worked to create awareness among people about the Act and its provisions, built a dialogue with GP leadership, filled lacunae in the planning process and ensured greater participation of rural people in the functioning of the employment guarantee. Of course, in Jharkhand the absence of GPs is itself the real weakness. But a clear mandate from the government supporting CSOs working on NREGA would provide the much-needed protection to thousands of unsung activists like Lalit Mehta, who in their undiminished optimism about India's future, continue to risk their lives to make initiatives like NREGA a success.


(The writer is co-founder, National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations supporting Gram Panchayats in planning, implementation and social audit of NREGA works.)