let them eat dignity

one dalit, one adivasi, now deceased, one muslim and no obcs in the 14 member national advisory council. ten member working group on 'food security' has one dalit and one muslim. upper caste india must be starving. five member working group on 'communal and targeted violence bill' has one muslim and one dalit. no obcs. the working group on 'tribal development' (9 members) has one dalit, and one adivasi, again the late ram dayal munda. and again, it seems like upper caste india needs development more than anyone else. what does the nac do? save the lives and, more importantly, livelihoods of those least represented in the nac. livelihoods are more important because saving them involves more money and power. lives, as everyone who lives in india knows, are cheaper.

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interesting word: livelihood. you could be making wicker mats, earning enough to keep your family hungry for only half the year, and suddenly you could lose your livelihood, be displaced, because an sez grabbed the forest where you got your raw material. sad.

but there are more chances, 99 times more perhaps, that you could be displaced, gradually or faster, even as you continue to do what you've always been doing: making mats.

life is what mukesh ambani does or arundhati roy does: never going hungry. what you do is die slowly, or faster.

the problem is: the state and society recognize ambani and roy. even if their jobs were interchanged, and roy ran a petrochemicals company and ambani was a writer, they would still be recognized and rewarded. even if roy lived in antilla and ambani only visited it. but you'd not be recognized, except as a livelihood.

the word 'livelihood' is a package of insults. you're lazy, you're ignorant, you're without merit: that's what they imply when they say they want to save your livelihood. why don't they talk about saving you? you're dirty, you're useless, you're a burden. you're low caste.

most of the lower castes are livelihoods, hardly human. you're a livelihood, a noun in neuter gender. they're ashamed to refer to you by name.

you will continue dying even if your livelihood is 'saved'. you were dying since your father's time, your grandfather's time, when there were no ambanis around. you'll die even if there were no ambanis around, now. you were dying when people like roy, or her father or her grandfather were doing life, quite well.

your livelihood will die if the private sector expands, as it did when the public sector expanded. and if roy or ambani tell you that's wrong, they're wrong. the evidence of the last sixty years, of the last two centuries quite clearly doesn't support their arguments.

livelihoods will only bring you certain death, but saving them is big business for others, as i said earlier.

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the idea of livelihoods for some and modern jobs, careers and professions for others fits in nicely with the varna scheme of things. the best experts on the new varna order in the country work in the nac. like in the old days when learned rishis played counselors to kings. listen to aruna roy explain what's dharma..er..dignity: 

Naurti is a great speaker; she understands issues and speaks concisely. We will always remember her for the set down she gave Surjit Bhalla the right wing economist in a TV talk show. He suggested that India’s rural employment guarantee act was money down the drain – a dole to every family would do better. She contemptuously suggested to him that if that was the case he should stay at home and twiddle his thumbs – she would pay him a daily wage (even if what she earned in a month would probably be less than what he earned in a day)! He blustered indignantly, as she asked him if he knew anything about the dignity of work.

naurti's dharma or dignity lies in digging trenches and filling them up. aruna roy's lies in working in the nac. surjit bhalla, the adharmi, seems to have forgotten that dignity is one's birthright. that it isn't about how much you earn but about how you earn it. how does it matter if some birthrights mean more money and others involve more sweat? that doesn't mean some are more equal, or treated with more dignity, than others. it only means some births were right, others weren't.

on minorities and minority shares

congress spokesperson manish tiwari objects to ex-royals using titles (like maharaja etc). and when is he going to drop his title 'tiwari'?
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video clip on youtube, now being circulated wildly, says 'brahmins have become a minority'. weren't brahmins always a minority? and also marathas, reddies, malas, kayasths, bhumihars, mahars- aren't/weren't they all minorities? the description the clip carries says: '7 minutes clip exposes the reality that today's brahmins have become oppressed and marginalized'. ah.. to be a 'minority' means to be 'oppressed and 'marginalized'.

glad that the gautierians of india have at last discovered that to be a minority in india means to be oppressed and marginalized.
*************

S.L.Rao, former director-general of NCAER, commenting on the budget observes:

"Leakages" are more than what reaches the beneficiaries. Increased spending on such schemes should have waited for the strengthening of the institutional framework, especially at the village level.

It's known that venal members of the administration rip off every social scheme.

he's talking about poverty alleviation schemes like the nrega. going by his wisdom, one can safely conclude that of this year's allocation of rs.39,100 crores for the nrega, at least rs.19,551 crores would leak (or be gobbled up by venal members of the administration and other termites in the middle)..and the intended beneficiaries would receive rs.19,549 crores if they're very lucky.

magnificent success

pranab mukherjee on the nrega:

It is widely acknowledged that the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, (NREGA) first implemented in February 2006, has been a magnificent success.

how magnificent was this success in, say, andhra pradesh?

* total no of persondays of work generated since inception (february 2006) until 7th, july, 2009:
62,69,87,820.
* at an average wage rate of rs. 83.73
* for 76,81,716 households or 1,38,46,019 individuals.
* total wages paid until now: 52,49,98 lakhs.

what could each of those households have received in total wages, on average, in each of those nearly four years of employment? anything between rs.1,300- 2,000 a year?

now, finally, how much of that money did actually reach each of those households? 15%, as rajiv gandhi would have said? or 50%?

and even if they received 100% of that money, after you account for inflation (which has been tougher on people who live on less than rs.20 day because the goods they buy have been hit the most in the last 4-5 years), what kind of a difference did nrega really make to their real incomes? far from magnificent, i'm sure.

now calculate how much each family that pays income tax saves from the latest proposals of the finance minister increasing income tax exemption limits. it'd be, on an average, more than what each of the first kind of households received for doing hard, manual labour. why didn't the finance minister pat himself on his back and call it a magnificent gesture, i wonder.

peeing on the wall

first woman speaker. they can't claim: first dalit speaker. i won't go back to the ruling party's efforts to derail the efforts to make the first woman speaker's father the first dalit prime minister of india three decades ago, but I am glad that it is closing in on the lead of the much regressive regional parties- it's only a decade behind them now.

another tokenism much celebrated- the nrega. i wonder if praful bidwai has ever closely checked the figures on this site? some simple arithmetic would tell him that not even 2% of rural india could have benefitted from this display of care. and i'm not even talking about leakages.

black money. here is ashok desai peeing on the wall that divides most of india from his kind of people, the ruling classes:

It is much simpler for them to park money in real estate.

on the other side of the wall, where 80% of india is crammed together on less than 20% of available living space, that wouldn't be remembered as a smart argument against mr.advani- he could as well have said: let them eat cake.

some perspective

estimates on the kind of funds the dole, covering more than 1.25 crore families in andhra pradesh, would require range from rs. 20,000-30,000 crores a year.

- that makes it bigger than the total allocation for the nregs (rs.16,000 crores) in the central budget of 2008-2009 for the entire country. please note: the 16,000 crores was the amount allocated, not the amount spent finally, by the end of the year.

a non-issue for this and other elections

one of those two houses (in the last two pictures) isn't located in an american suburb. it's in hyderabad, spread over a plot of 1,000 sq.yards. its neighbours on the right, left, across the street are also as big (or bigger).

why would anyone want to build an american style home in an indian city? because he/she can. it doesn't matter that the design chosen isn't suitable for all kinds of geographies. or for all kinds of infrastructural environments. a middle class american home in the middle of india- if you can't throw that kind of a tantrum, would you be considered upper class in india?

let's look at the scale of this architectural nakhra: the united states is three times as big as india, in terms of territorial size. in terms of population, india is three times, roughly, as big as the united states. an average indian home, given those constraints, shouldn't be bigger than 1/9th an american home. googling, i find that the average home size in the united states is 2330 sq.ft (2004). the hyderabad home in the picture is nearly 9 times the average american home!

that home is in a neighbourhood where mps and mlas were given cheap grants of land by the government. it's expensive- 6-7 acres in the neighbourhood could foot satyam's wage bill for a month.

i am not going to ask- how do people manage to build such big, expensive homes in india? i am more interested in this question- what are those kids (in the first two pictures) doing in this neighbourhood, where mps, mlas and other lawmakers live, if the nregs is such a big success in rural india?

they work in those big homes in the neigbourhood. sparsely inhabited, big homes- because a lot of the owners' kids live, study or work abroad. so why do the owners still live in such big homes? taking care of such large places- isn't that a big problem? cleaning them, keeping every kind of fixture, wiring, plumbing etc., in working order. they can afford to live there because the kids are cheap. you build such big homes in india because you know you can depend on those kids to keep them in running order. because you know you can depend on programmes like the nregs etc., to keep the supply going.

chidambaram says tdp's cash dole promise makes no economic sense

chidambaram would like the poor to use the service entrance, always, and to never barge in through the front door, i suppose. the nregs shows them their place? what does the nregs (and chidambaram) expect the poor to do? sidle in through the gate of this huge mansion where the mai-baap sarkar lives, and if you get past that and receive a job card, tread softly and unobtrusively, always clinging to the walls of the compound, negotiating assorted other project/programme/panchayat personnel and if you manage to slip past them to the back of the mansion...you wait. till you're called and shown the dirty dishes which you're supposed to clean. without using scrub or soap. and weeks later, when you go back for your wages, follow the same sidling, treading, clinging, waiting process. you might get lucky the first time. and if you don't, follow the same waiting, sidling, treading, clinging, waiting process again.

if he wasn't in power, and he wasn't sitting beside y.s.rajashekhar reddy, who has converted the pre-2004 outrage over farmers' suicides into a mandate for making unimaginable amounts of money (the cpm's top leader in the state had accused the chief minister of making over rs.10,000 crores, significantly, when they were still a part of the u.p.a.,) for his family, his contractor-mlas, and his partymen from large badly planned irrigation projects (canals without reservoirs, reservoirs without water, lift irrigation projects without power), mr.chidambaram, who has lamented on several occasions the purposelessness of 'outlays without outcomes' would see a lot of sense, and not just economic, in naidu's dole.

health and education should've first claim on the revenues of the state, mr.chidambaram? and how did your government at the centre (and in congress ruled andhra pradesh and other states) recognize those claims? expenditure on both areas hasn't reached half the targets you set yourself in the common minimum programme.

you'll talk better sense after losing the elections, i'm sure.

finally, a political party that promises a dole

An untouchable Dukhi (an out-caste, played by Om Puri) approaches the village Brahmin to request him to set an auspicious date for his daughter's upcoming wedding according to the Hindu astrology. The Brahmin promises to perform the task in exchange of Dukhi slaving over household chores in return.

Already ailing and weak due to a recent fever, Dukhi agrees and begins with cleaning the Brahman's house and stable. When he is asked to chop a huge block of wood, Dukhi’s anger increases with each blow. Working in scorching sun, hungry and malnourished, the he dies. The corpse lies close to the road used by the Brahmins to go to the village well. The untouchables shun it for fear of police investigation. What can be done with the corpse of an untouchable that no one will touch?

that's the storyline of sadgati, a film directed by satyajit ray. around us, every day, we see enough evidence that poverty in india is indeed as devastating, if not more, as that found in sub-saharan africa or in any of the most wretched places on earth as many pundits say it is. how do we fight it? mainly through the central and state governments' poverty alleviation schemes- shouldn't the word schemes instead of just scheme tell us how successful we've been in fighting poverty until now? why do we need more than one scheme if the first one worked? or the next one? or the one after that? experts say there are thousands of them now, exhibiting various stages of morbidity. almost but never dying. and then coming back in new avatars and names, with the same old resilience and....frailty.

the latest poverty alleviation scheme, the nregs, much touted as one of the most radical, always reminds me of the movie sadgati. the weak need to perform to deserve a break? like the villain in a typical masala film makes the heroine dance to buy the hero's freedom? in my view, that attitude is disgustingly cynical, because at its core lies the brahminical conviction that the poor and the wretched of indian society feign wretchedness. because poverty in india is not like poverty elsewhere. it's sub-human, as the experts keep telling us. so why don't the proponents of poverty alleviation schemes like the nregs postpone their enthusiasm and their experimentation until it reaches human levels?

today, one political party in india has come up with an idea that promises to bring poverty to human levels. i congratulate the telugu desam pary for seeing sense, at last, in the idea of a dole for the poor. for even bringing that idea into public debate, even if the tdp wins this elections or not, the party deserves a generous round of applause. finally, the death of the poverty alleviation scams may have arrived.

i'd like to say more, but later perhaps. my earlier posts on the dole are here.

a dole in pakistan

a slightly old article in cobra post says:

Soon after forming his government, Punjab Chief Shahbaz Sharif announced the Punjab Food Support Scheme to help the "poorest of the poor". This, some insiders believe, was done to preempt the PPP's Benazir Ration Card scheme.

The 'hurriedly shaped' programme is worth 21.60 billion with the aim to pay to each of 1.8 million families, a money order worth Rs 1000. The scheme was formally launched on Aug 14, 2008 and will continue throughout the fiscal year 2008-09. [emphasis mine].

the details in the article are not very clear but i'd admit that this news makes me happy. shows that the pakistani politicians are wiser than many politicians from some so-called progressive states in india. from promising free television sets to free rice to free lpg- political parties increasingly speak like large retail stores in these states.

why doesn't anybody talk about a dole like the pakistanis? because a dole is most likely to be leakage-proof?

[please click on the label dole for my other posts on the subject].

driving ms.roy

the andhra pradesh government has issued 138 government orders until now to make the employment guarantee act, which guarantees 100 days of work to every rural household, work better. a commenter on a telugu channel asks: how many times was the constitution amended?

one report says only 4 lakh people have been provided some work until now. of the 88 lakh applicants who'd been issued job cards in the state. less than 5% performance is okay with p.sainath. i guess it's okay with praful bidwai, who wrote in journals published across the globe and spoke in conferences held in as disparate international venues as the gulf and japan before the act was brought in, too. curiously, he seems to have lost interest in the subject now. like so many others engaged in shouldering the brahminical burden of educating the dumb lower castes about their rights (why not just educate them by making the schools work is a dumber question).

well, 5% seems to be the universal, but unwritten, performance norm expected of most of the 1000 odd schemes in operation right now (yes, there are a 1000 odd schemes according to dr. jayaprakash narayan of lok satta and i'm not sure the number includes schemes fathered exclusively by state governments). including the pds. and silence, or the occasional outburst in defense of failing schemes, also seems to be the universal performance norm expected of radical proponents of all such schemes...after the bills have been passed.

[thanks apurva, hope you're reading this, for leading me to the title].

smart cards: time for a smart dole?

a recent news report:

The Centre is finalising a proposal to use multi-application smart cards with unique IDs for citizens to check largescale illegal immigration and to better target and implement government schemes.

the smart cards can be used in other, much more important, ways too:

"The multi-purpose smart card will help in effective targeting of subsidies and better monitoring of programmes and ensure that fraudulent multiple claims are minimised. It will also help in checking illegal migration in the border areas," said an official.

The need for a multi-purpose national identity card has been felt for purposes as diverse as drawing benefits from government’s flagship schemes like NREGA, getting ration from PDS shops or meeting security concerns.

'effective targeting of subsidies and better monitoring of programmes'? i'd talked about how a straight forward dole would be much more effective than a hundred different varieties of elaborately devised poverty alleviation schemes in this post. and how poor the monitoring of programmes such as the nrega is, in these ( a, b, c) posts. and i'd talked here about how other developing countries like mexico are using variants of the dole to not just supplement the incomes of poor villagers- they're also using them to achieve better spread of education, and to improve women and child care etc., looks like the goi has learnt some important lessons- but has it learnt the most important one? a hundred different schemes run by a hundred different kind of central, state and local government agencies would always mean that the programmes could spring several thousand holes through which funds could leak. why not keep things simple?

why not stick to one smart programme, a dole, instead of making the poor try to prove their identity, their deprivation, their need to several authorities through several kinds of registration, documentation, endorsement and verification, every time a government, at any random level, develops doubts about a certain programme or wants to a introduce new scheme-scam to further its own electoral or other interests? in this context, i'd like to express my agreement with the indian communists- they have always fought against targeting. i've different reasons for endorsing universalization- one smart universal scheme, i believe, would be more effective than several poorly targeted, and even more poorly monitored schemes. one smart scheme, i'm sure, would eliminate the need for all the other schemes. a dole for every rural family could be used to achieve much more than a small reduction in current levels of poverty. as i'd tried to point out in this post, it could also be used to ward off future poverty.

john elliot, writing here, discusses the smart cards too.

this brahmin journalist deserves a magsaysay

Faced with job quotas, companies could stop outsourcing and resume in-house operations. They can hire dalits and tribals as sweepers, canteen workers, drivers, chowkidars and so on.

They can open holiday homes for officers in the hills, employing tribals. This will enable them to fulfil job quotas without affecting management or factory quality.

Many dalits and tribals may find this quite acceptable, because they will move from the unorganised to the organised sector.

Third tactic: Convert officers, technicians and skilled workers into consultants. Top staff need not be salaried employees. They can equally be consultants on contract. Consultants get no provident fund or leave travel benefits.

i'd call that an honest, heartfelt expression of self-interest. and this? well, that is more like all the outrage, indignation, handwringing and breastbeating that was probably on display here, all through last week. or like this display of aforementioned theatrics:

Land has a great deal to do with both economic and social status. Let's look at who are the poor in India. Of the Indian poor, 40 per cent are landless agricultural labourers; 45 per cent are small or marginal farmers. (60 per cent of Indian farmers own less than an acre of land). This means that 85 per cent of the poor are either landless or marginal farmers. It's in the first category that you will find dalits in large numbers.

how would you characterize someone who, after more than one decade of writing passionately about the injustices being perpetrated on rural india, admits in a moment of rare honesty (albeit in a circuitous manner) that that he hasn't exactly been advocating the cause of the weakest in indian society all that while but raising concerns about the interests of india's upper caste farmers (who benefits the most from india's agricultural subsidies, support prices and public investments in such areas as irrigation anyway)? sainath's friend jean dreze is less circuitous about acknowledging that support prices etc., do not benefit lower caste farmers:

There are two answers to this question. One is that the poorer sections of the farming community benefit very little, if at all, from price support measures. Consider for instance small farmers in, say, Orissa or Jharkhand or Chhatisgarh. These farmers typically sell little grain, if any, on the market; instead, they tend to combine subsistence farming with labour migration and other income-earning activities that allow them to buy non-food commodities.Hence, higher food prices do not help them.

dreze also thinks the pds is a scam but we know sainath's views on that - he believes the pds 'has wilted under policies clearly aimed at dismantling it'.. who does sainath speak for? does he speak for the dalits and the lower castes?

Typically, the forward caste will till at the head of the water, the middle caste will till in the middle water, and the tail water will be left to the lower caste and the Dalits. Now in Rajasthan this problem does not arise, since there is no water, no river in the border areas. So how is the positioning of the Dalit basti determined in Rajasthan? In all other parts of the country where the river water runs north to south, the Dalit basti will be in the south. Why is it on the east and northeast there? This happens because Dalits work on leather, which stinks and our sacred nostrils cannot be offended by this menial activity, so we place them outside, so the smell of carcasses and tanning does not enter the village.

he speaks for the farmers and he speaks for the dalits and the lower castes. but the good book says: no one can serve two masters. if sainath is concerned about farmers who place 'food on our table' he can't be speaking for '85 per cent of the poor (who) are either landless or marginal farmers'. who does sainath speak for? or, let me rephrase the question: who has he (and the whole army of born again pro-farmer advocates among the indignant classes that the last one decade had spawned) served? institutional credit for farmers has more than doubled, from around 80, 000 crores to 2,00,000 crores, since the last three years. investment in irrigation has gone up everywhere- andhra pradesh, maharashtra and karnataka together, for instance, have spent more than 100,000 crores (maybe more) on irrigation in the last 3-10 years and will be spending more in the near future.. and the central government has just raised the support price of wheat to rs.1000 a quintal etc., etc., have the suicides stopped? oh..those were mostly misguided obc, dalit farmers who shouldn't have tried to 'place food on our table' by trying to compete with those who'd be served everything- water, subsidies, credit, price support- first. why couldn't they remain content with the nregs?

finally, who has he served? my magsaysay goes to aiyar for being more honest. and less theatrical.

(read also: brahmin journalist bags magsaysay award)

let them eat cake

There are currently four major schemes in operation that essentially aim at fighting hunger and food insecurity; namely,PDS(public distribution system),ICDS (integrated child development scheme), MDM ( mid-day meal scheme) and most importantly NREGS(national rural employment guarantee scheme).There would be very few Indians who would have to skip meals if we could just make these four schemes corruption- free. [...] PDS and NREGS are two most important schemes to fight hunger and ensure food security. But , what is the actual performance of these schemes on the ground ? According to a recent report of the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution , “In the last three years, Rs 31,585.98 crore worth of wheat and rice meant for the poorest of the poor was siphoned off from the public distribution system(PDS). Last year alone, Rs 11,336.98 crore worth of food grain that the government is supposed to distribute to the needy at subsidised prices found its way into the market illegally. Every year, India's poor are cheated out of 53.3% of wheat and 39% of rice meant for them...There is largescale diversion of PDS grain across India… Exceptions apart, the poor in India simply can’t trust the government to deliver them food supplies.

i know there still are people around who believe the nregs is the best thing to happen to india after jnu..i hope they find this annoying:

Delhi- based CEFS(Centre for Environment and Food Security) has carried out a survey in 100 villages of Orissa and found that of Rs 733 crore spent under NREGS during 2006-7, over Rs 500 crore has been siphoned off and misappropriated by the government officials of executing agencies. Moreover, as against the claims of Orissa Government that no needy household in 19 NREGS districts of the state was denied wage employment and each needy household was given an average 57 days of wage employment under NREGS, CEFS study has revealed that large number of needy households were denied not only jobs but even job cards, and not more than 5 days of average wage employment has been given to each needy family in these 19 NREGS districts. We have found that more than 75 per cent of the NREGS funds spent during last year have been siphoned off. However, we are absolutely certain that there are thousands of villages in Orissa where scale of misappropriation is 80-90 per cent. It is distressing to note that there has been open and participatory loot of NREGS funds in Orissa. We have reasons to believe that the entire state administration is party to this loot.

read more here. and i'd told you so here and here and here and here and here.

they agree with me in mexico..and at the nyt..and the world bank

'In 1995, the Mexican peso crashed and the economy contracted by 6 percent. At the time, Santiago Levy, the deputy finance minister, realized that the country’s antipoverty programs were going to fail its poor. The programs were a hodgepodge of food subsidies, adopted in response to powerful food producers. They were inefficient because they targeted foods everyone ate, rich and poor. Some even targeted foods the poor don’t eat, such as bread – poor Mexicans eat tortillas.
Mr. Levy saw a looming disaster – but also an opportunity to build political support for an antipoverty program that worked. Stealthily, he organized a pilot project to test a new idea in Campeche, far away from the capital so it would draw little notice. He began a program to pay poor mothers to keep their children in school and take their kids to the health clinic. He compared the results to poverty figures in a group of similar villages without the program. It was a great success. Data in hand, he persuaded President Ernesto Zedillo to phase in the new program and phase out the food subsidies.
Oportunidades, formerly called Progresa, is now embraced by all parties in Mexico and, with financing from the World Bank, is helping virtually every poor family. It not only focuses antipoverty spending on those who really need it, it does so in a way that encourages families to break the cycle of poverty for their children.' (from this blog).

looks familiar? doesn't it look similar to what i had suggested a few months ago in this post ?

'why do they pay so little attention to the non-voting children in mahbubnagar as compared with the voters in mumbai? a simple dole of ,say, rupees five hundred a month (which is what, almost, the current bill assures) to rural parents who send their children to school would not only cost much less than what the current project would but also a. stop the migration and b. protect the rights of the children.would you call that charity? most of the subsidies and other giveaways intended for the poor are today cornered by the more privileged classes. why shouldn't the poor have their share? but that would not be elaborate enough for the wise men.'

that was actually a part of a long comment i had originally made here on a dilip d'souza article on the employment guarantee act (which i had reposted on this blog as an independent post). this idea had taken a hazy kind of shape in my mind around two years ago when i had started looking at poverty alleviation programmes in india a little closely. i had nursed serious doubts about their efficacy for more than a decade but..ordinary, well-meaning citizens in india don't usually question these programmes hard enough...and they usually let their hearts rule over their heads in these matters. but the nrega was a kind of last straw for me..because i knew, whatever the intentions behind it, it was going to miserably fail. but that wasn't why i primarily objected to it, there were other reasons...and chief among them was that it was a shortsighted program - it didn't address the problem of future poverty, because it ignores the causes of present poverty. worse - it takes money away from programs which would actually help the most in fighting future poverty - schools. funds for the nrega would mean that the much needed increase in the woefully inadequate funding schooling, and education in general in india receives..can be ruled out for a long time.the upa govt had promised to increase budgets for education upto 6% of gdp, as first prescribed by the kothari commission way back in the sixties. now, how can that happen? the twin objectives of my idea were to address both the problems of a.illiteracy b. poverty, in that order, because poverty can't be solved without solving the problem of illiteracy, in my view.

the idea, in a nutshell, was that the govt pays rural parents a certain allowance/dole/sum every month to encourage them to send their children to school. the design of the plan was simple: direct transfer of funds every month from delhi to every villager's doorstep. please read the post and the comments to get a better idea. my contention is that the idea has better chances of fighting leakage and corruption that plague most such schemes in india (because it is based on direct transfer of money from delhi to the beneficiaries...and does not, as annie of known turf and otherindia presumes in the comments, involve any other agency in this transaction).

now, i am pleasantly surprised to find that there are other people in the world, much more important people, endorsing a program that so closely resembles an idea that i'd thought up! the mexico program is now being touted as one of the most successful anti-poverty programs, alongside eight other great endeavours such as universal vaccination, de soto's ownership titles for the poor idea and microcredit etc., Read more about those eight programs on the Poverty & Growth Blog of the World Bank Institute here.

milton friedman and the nrega

'While traveling in India, Milton Friedman came upon a large crew of ditch-diggers. When he asked why they were all using shovels to dig the ditch instead of getting a backhoe, the foreman replied that it was part of a government project to create jobs. “I see,” said Friedman, “I was confused because I thought you were trying to dig a ditch. If what you’re really trying to do is create jobs, you should all use spoons!”'

i found that here.

less than 10% pro-poor

please read my new post on the performance/implementation of the employment guarantee scheme at shivam vij's blog, national highway.

digging trenches, filling trenches

like i said (or made a very cynical forecast ) here, citizens who signed up for the employment guarantee scheme in a village in vizianagaram district (andhra pradesh) are filling up a tank they had dug up a year ago (for the food-for-work programme). the project director, accosted by television reporters, offered a very longwinded explanation ....and a long sheepish grin. the channel, which reported the scam, also says most of the small-time political leaders in the region are making good money from distributing 'the right to work' among select applicants/non-existent benami applicants.
also, another nosy reporter had discovered, a few weeks ago, that jobcards had been issued in the names of a lot of, not benami, but namcheen applicants in madhya pradesh. lucky applicants included some top babus in the state government, mlas, ministers and..

education guarantee act, anyone?

i had commented thusly on a well-written (as always) post by dilip d'souza a few months ago. the post was on the employment guarantee act and dilip's dissatisfaction with it being turned into an assurance instead of a guarantee. (dilip did not respond to it.. i don't know if he read it. i'd like to republish it here in the hope that it might elicit some response. i'd like to add some more thoughts to this in a later post).

here goes :

''Thus the scheme to "assure" wage-employment to poor rural families "assures" instead of "guarantees" so that the scheme will not be legally binding.' (dilip's words).
the govt.,(the centre and the states) spends around two-and-a-half hundred thousand crores every year with the aim of helping the poor. this it does through various subsidies, grants and other means.now, you tell me, how is the government supposed to 'guarantee' the spending of any amount beyond this huge sum already committed? the sum committed already constitutes a major portion of its yearly budgetary spending - how is it supposed to raise(something in the range of 10,000-60,000 crores) and spend(and more effectively than the earlier schemes you have referred to ) a sum beyond its current capacity ? under the circumstances, don't you think the pm did the honorable thing by 'assuring' and not guaranteeing work? a guarantee would have been a false promise. the proponents of this current project are the same ideologically inclined wise men who had earlier backed the failed schemes you mentioned. they have always remained closest to the ears of the powers-that-be and (avowedly) to the pulse of the poor. it's funny that they should raise the questions we should be asking. right to work shall be supported by the right to information act? what about the right to education, guaranteed much earlier? a character in the movie 'austin powers' points out why james bond survives all the attempts on his life : because the villains were too smart for their own good. they would think up elaborate schemes to torture and kill him where a simple bullet to the head would have served much better. why do we fall prey to the temptations of these smart, elaborate schemes when a simple straightforward dole would cost half as much and be doubly as effective? it would avoid the pitfalls of going through the sieves and filters of the babus, elected officials, contractors and others who block the path between the poor and the promised manna. it would also eliminate the necessity of a hundred such schemes and considerably lessen the strain on governmental resources and more importantly, attention. mahbubnagar, one of the poorest districts in india, sends every year (as reported by mr.p.sainath in the course one of his expeditions in search of the holy drought) tens of thousands of migrant construction workers to mumbai and the school drop-out rate in the district too increases every year. you would find a similar picture in all the backward districts of india. the schizophrenia, i believe, lies not in the attitude of the middle classes who live only a few notches better than the slumdwellers (at times) but in the attitude of those who hide behind the poor. why do they pay so little attention to the non-voting children in mahbubnagar as compared with the voters in mumbai? a simple dole of ,say, rupees five hundred a month (which is what, almost, the current bill assures) to rural parents who send their children to school would not only cost much less than what the current project would but also a. stop the migration and b. protect the rights of the children.would you call that charity? most of the subsidies and other giveaways intended for the poor are today cornered by the more privileged classes. why shouldn't the poor have their share? but that would not be elaborate enough for the wise men. have you considered why the pm had said so little on the bill he is supposed to pilot than its votaries in the political class and the press? because it ties him up in the ultimate fiscal knot which would severely restrict any maneuvring space he would need to formulate any ideas of his own on tackling poverty or any other major issue (like how to reduce the burden of the 'elaborate' schemes so that the poor get more attention not the poverty-mongers). the wise men have effectively made irrelevant the very virtue/merit on which he was chosen: his ideas. let's not support this farcical exercise of creating 'work' for the poor when the government can't find work for its own babus. or, if we should, let's rename it : right to profits-for-all-except-the poor.'

have no bread ? eat ega.

a conversation between a babu and a citizen :

citizen: ega ? i still don't understand what it means .
babu: ( a little sarcastic) you needn't, because it would be cooked and delivered to your doorstep as egp.
c. what's an egp, does it contain eggs?
b. no, but it may contain grain as a nutrition supplement.
c. may contain ?
b. it depends, you see, on the availability of funds and stocks. and work.
c. work ?
b. yes, you have to pay in work for whatever you get in return.
c. work ?
b. like filling up trenches.
c. oh ?
b. and digging up trenches. or whatever you in the boondocks consider 'productive assets'.
c. so it's a dole?
b. definitely not. we tax the rich and pay for this programme.
c. (now really interested) you mean you tax the rich and pay us?
b. no, we tax the rich and make you work.
c. that means we would get all that you take away from the rich?
b. no, you might get the minimum wage.
c. who gets the rest?
b. what do you mean?
c. i mean who gets the rest of the money from the taxes after you pay me?
b. the pm says 'institutional mechanisms' would be set up to deal with that.
c. (disgusted) deal with whoever steals the money ?
b. no, to see that there is a 'timely transfer of resources' ?
c. who gets transferred ?
b. whoever fails to show 'transparency in maintenance of muster rolls and payment of wages.' ?
c. what ?
b.whoever says you worked for 30 days when you only worked for 3.
c. who ?
b. your programme officer.
c. why should he say that i've worked for 30 days when i've not worked for a day ?
b. because he's not transparent - he should tell you everything about the scheme the day you register.
c.( feeling he's the one that's transparent) nobody tells me anything.
b. don't worry. now everything has to be put down on paper and recorded. you'll also get a job card....don't pawn that.
c. and then?
b. you apply for work.
c. i can't write.
b. that's okay, the panchayat will help you.
c. what's in it for them ?
b. 50%.
c. you mean they take away half of what i get paid ?
b. no, you idiot. they get half of all funds for the scheme.
c. who gets the other half ?
b. the programme officer decides that.
c. i work for nothing ?
b.you get paid for whatever work you do.
c. (scratching his head, making rapid calculations on his palm) the officer gets 50% and the panchayat gets another fifty..please sir, what do i get?
b. (exhausted) you get paid for 100 days of work.
c. what work ?
b. (#$%..!) whatever work the panchayat assigns you.
c. (thinking of his past experiences) what if they don't ?
b. you get paid anyway.. at least a part of the minimum wage for not being given work after applying.
c. ( warming up to this idea) what if i gave you a part of that.. you know..so that i
keep getting whatever money..
b. (frowning) yes.
c. ...without being assigned any work..
b. (feigning anger) that's illegal.
c. (grumbling) i won't get any work because the sarpanch doesn't like me. i voted for the opposition..
b. you can complain.
c. what would happen then ?
b. the programme would be stopped in the whole district.
c. ( wondering how that would help ) who thought up this scheme..a sardar ?
b. oh, it has its supporters... a belgian who likes yatras.. an italian who doesn't... a bengali who didn't like the ias... ....
c. (lost in thought) i can ask sagar anna for help.
b. who is he?
c. he heads the racha (..konda dalam, he almost says, but stops )... maybe i can give him something..
b. who ?
c. the sarpanch.
b. i told you the whole programme would be stopped if there are any reports of corruption.
c. so how do i get any work?
b. you apply for it, you are assigned work and then you get paid for it.. every week ..or after two..weeks..maybe. you know how it is..
c. what if i don't get paid ? (now getting wiser) don't tell me ... i shouldn't complain..
b. i didn't say that..you could tell the gram sabha.
c. that's what i did when he siphoned off money from the housing scheme to build another floor on his house.
b. and ?
c. he hates my guts now.
b. so why don't you talk to the other leader then..the one you voted for..
c. no one listens to him now..they found fwp rice in his cowshed...
b. don't worry, they can't stop the payment..i'll be there.
c. what's in it for you ?
b. 50%.
the citizen walks away, thinking of sagar anna.