Author: Chitrangada Choudhury
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: January 16, 2006
Introduction: Jambhla is emblematic of what
Express first reported- corruption in EGS, with fake muster rolls including
payments to the dead
Jambhla's villagers live ever dark cliche
of the other India.
Deep in the Sahyadri mountains on the Maharashtra-Dadra Nagar Haveli border,
the northern village of Thane's Kathkari tribe is remote with its unfinished
road negotiable only by foot.
No house has a phone or drinking water supply,
a handful have electric meters. Illiteracy levels are high-the most educated
villager is a Std IX dropout-as is the dropout rate with only a primary school
servicing its 100-odd households.
After decades of child malnutrition, the government responded last year by
building an (unfinished) anganwadi centre, But inside, supplies are minimum;
a 'rescue centre' for malnourished children is 4 km away.
In its stunning but harsh landscape, livelihoods
are tenuous with it single rain-fed crop of rice or millet on small-sized
farms leaving villagers anxious for work the rest of the year.
Jambhla is emblematic of villages across 200 districts-including 12 in Maharashtra-
which will see the Rs 17,600 crore first phase of the Centre's National Rural
Employment Guarantee Programme starting February, inspired by Maharashtra's
very own 28-year-old Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS).
Jambhla is also emblematic of the corruption in the EGS-fake muster rolls
including payments to the dead, which the state government is now probing
after the The Indian Express first reported it on January 12.
When the Express examined two EGS rolls of works drawn up by the Public Works
Department (PWD) from January and February 2005, it found that the PWD had
cited 30 days of work and Rs 1,35,427 and Rs 1,79,467 as payments respectively
to Jambhla's families. Villagers say they have never worked on either work.
The rolls cite 'improvement work' over two l-km stretches on a taluka road
running north through Jawhar. The 'workplace' on the January roll is cited
as Dabheri a village 4 km away and February's work claims to have taken place
at Gondpada, over 9 km away.
Bhaskar Morgha figures, on the muster, with
a thumb impression as proof of a Rs 1,140 payment, but wife Lata, village
anganwadi worker and one of Jambhla's few literate women, says: "My mister
signs his name in English. He never gives his angthi."
Bhaskar, a class 9 dropout, demonstrated his
signature to prove his point, as did Lakshya Dangte to whom the roll assigns
a thumb impression for a payment of Rs 1,040.
Says a senior IAS officer who's probed Maharashtra's EGS implementation: "The
fact is most villagers never get to see the actual muster roll."
Villagers also testify to the feudal manner in which the programme is administered.
"Raosahebs (officials) never show us the muster roll," says U Dangte,
a marginal farmer who studied till Std III. "If we ask what wage they
are putting on it, they threaten to remove us from the work," he adds.
"Rs 50 to 55 is what we get," says
agricultural labourer Sakari Akne, arguing she's never seen" Rs 96 daily
wage, which is what officials drawing up the roll claim to have given her.
Some of Jambhla's villagers" say they
worked for five days in November 2005 on a Forest Department EGS work of bunding,
but two months on still haven't received wages. "Even if they" don't
pay us, there is nothing we can do," says Dangte.
Villagers want the EGS works to be implemented,
especially when post-agricultural season" they have nothing to fall back
on. "Otherwise, we have to set off or the cities, bundles on our head
and children in tow," says Radha. "Twelve families locked their"
houses and left last week."
