What PREM Does: Fighting Corruption
on Richard Johnson (India), 16/Nov/2010 05:02, 34 days ago
This is the fourth in aseries of postsabout the development work ofPeople's Rural Education Movement(PREM) Orissa, India.Opportunity KnocksA Block Development Official (BDO) sits a table in his office in town. On his desk is a handwritten roster of about 1700 names of people in the 25 or so villages in his block who have applied for job cards. Some of the names are fictitious. Others are friends and relatives of theBDO. And still others are real, but they are of people who've no idea what their job card entitles them to, or of people who don't even know they've applied. He writes a receipt for a tent--meant to provide shade for road-construction workers--which he never actually bought. He finishes a report that says 12km of road were completed last month; in fact it was only 2km.*To his district-level supervisor (whose friends and family are also on the job-card roster) theBDOsubmits all these documents as records of public works in his jurisdiction, and finally he withdraws the corresponding funds from the government coffers. All in a day's work.Elsewhere, an Adivasi manis still waiting for his first day of work. But on his job card, which he doesn't yet hold, there is already a fake entry showing 126 days' work. On the report submitted to the state auditor, a figure ofINR5950 (CAD$135) is listed as the wages already paid this man. He has no idea.National Rural Corruption Guarantee?All of this is provided for by India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005, a law that provides federally funded employment in local development for all willing workers for a minimum of 100 days per year at a minimum wage of 60 Indian Rupees (INR; equivalent to $1.25 Canadian Dollars (CAD)) per day.It stipulates employment for all adults in poor districts through job cards which should be granted within 15 days of application; employment within 5km of one's home village; equal wages for men for women, with a minimum of 33% of job cards in any given village reserved for women; benefits such as unemployment insurance and water.**Even in a country known for socialist rural economic policies over the first few decades of its independence, few stimulus plans ever developed by the government of India have been as progressive asNREGA. And few schemes ever dreamed up by the government of India have made corruption this easy.There is overwhelming evidence ofsystematic corruption ofNREGAin every state of India, but nowhere is this corruption more rampant and--due to its infamous mantle as India's poorest state--more devastating thanin Orissa.Village leaders and middlemen take advantage of illiteracy and desperation among lower-caste and tribal villagers, cooking the books and forging job cards. Workers complete a day of labour building acheck dam or a gravel road, and the attendance sheet will say they worked 33 days; 32 days' worth of their wages will go somewhere else. A government auditor doesn't feel like visiting a handful of remote villages; for a bribe he'll accept aBDO's story that all job cards have been properly distributed.A 2006-07 independent study by theCentre for Environment and Food Security (CEFS)found that of theINR7.33 billion (CAD$165 million) invested by the federal government in theNREGAscheme in the 6 poorest districts of the state of Orissa, more thanINR5 billion (CAD$112m, or nearly 70% of all funds) were siphoned off in misappropriations and outright peculation by government officials and middlemen.*** "Activists andNGOs spreading awareness aboutNREGAamong rural poor of the state," noted the CEFSstudy, "are threatened with dire consequences and many have been terrorised into silence byBDOs and other executing officials. Some local activists who accompanied theCEFSresearch team during survey in Tentulikhunti block in last week of May are being threatened by the government officials and contractors who have misappropriatedNREGAfunds."Putting on a Corruption ClinicPREMis among theNGOs working to combat corruption, principally by training activists and educating the rural and marginalized public to take action against this scourge.It's not easy, not in an environment where police, government officials and other elites are hand in glove (and glove in pocket). But recently some extra help arrived.India has a Right to Information (RTI) Act, coincidentally also passed into law in 2005. TheRTIActguarantees access to any public document within 15 days of request. Muster rolls, job cards, payment schedules andBDOreports, to name just a few related toNREGA, are all public documents accessible underRTI.****One thingPREMhas done is establish a number of regionalRTIClinics, such as the one pictured above in Rayagada district. These essentially are training centres wherePREMconducts workshops on how to utilizeRTI: how to file a request; how to follow up and gain the documents; where to seek legal and other aid if necessary; how to take collective action against corruption. Clinic facilitators utilize methods like group discussion, role play, lawyer visits and testimonials from victims to help instruct community members.Even beyond the workshops, theseRTIclinics are open all the time as walk-in information booths, staffed by community activits who are trained to help victims of corruption take the necessary action for justice.To read a case study about howPREM'sRTIclinics helped one tribal community bring a huge land scam to the public eye (and put the culprits behind bars), check out theJuly-August 2010 issue ofPREM's E-News.The photos in this post are from anNREGA-funded road-building project in Gajapati district, Orissa.* Excerpted from apress releaseof an NGO in Bihar. ABlockis a constituted jurisdiction of governance in India which is comprised of anywhere between 100-250 villages and at least one major town.**Full text of NREGA 2005 [PDF]*** The six poorest districts of Orissaare Bolangir, Nuapada, Kalahandi, Koraput, Nabarangpur and Rayagada.Read more on this study and the impact of NREGA corruption in Orissa.****Full text of RTI Act 2005 [PDF]