Failing a well intended scheme

The National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme is by far the most ambitious programme launched by the Ministry of Rural Development. With an outlay of close to Rs. 10,000 or more for every family in rural areas, the amount of money being pumped in through the scheme is very high. The kind of preparation that has gone into developing systems to effectively implement such a scheme however is very inadequate; not just to prevent corruption, but to take the scheme anywhere near the intended beneficiaries!
The scheme basically guarantees employment to the unskilled rural labour. This is the point of emphasis. The crux of the scheme is to convey to the rural labour that they will be given employment opportunity for at least 100 days in a year for the whole family. These 100 days are there for the taking whenever the family pleases. It is in this communication that the scheme has not succeeded.
The local politician and the public do not subscribe to this thought process. For them the scheme is basically the physical infrastructure it builds - be it a talaab, kuva or whatever. The public know of the scheme as individual beneficiaries of the infrastructure that is being built under the scheme- ie, the scheme is one in which they get a kapil dhara kuva for themselves, not one which gives mazdoori to the villagers, be it rain or shine.
Why this is a critical fault is as follows. Since the whole concentration is on the physical work as such and not on the element of giving employment opportunity, it is always easier to get the work done using machines and claim the amount for the work done. Well, if you are thinking about how the muster roll entries are going to be done if the machines are going to do the work, there are many ways out.
One way is that there is no entry made at all! These would be evident in a few months time when the MIS data entry is done. No record is maintained. The money is just being siphoned out. By the time there is a hue and cry, it will all be too late. If there is an insistence on record maintenance, these machines can act as proxy for those job card holders who do not care to come for work at the prevailing wage rate. Their jobcards are reported, but not distributed. They are there with the gram panchayat to be manipulated at any point in time. Still worse, the muster rolls are being filled with random job card numbers. Would it not lead to a probability of the same person shown as working at two different spots at the same time? Yes it would. Given that multiple agencies are at work like the WRD, RES and the gram panchayat. It won't be till the MIS data entry is done that this mishap is going to be evident.
The guideline makers would be quick to point out that there is an employment register maintained at the Gram Panchayat level which should ideally prevent such duplication. Yes, ideally it should. But in practice it does not. One reason is that the record at the Gram Panchayat level is not maintained to precision. Then, there is the practice of sanctioning huge works from the district level, done by agencies like the RES, WRD and NGOs. They run parallel to the works done by the gram panchayat with no coordination what so ever, thereby resulting in definite double counting. There are directions that line agencies should start work only on a work order from the Programme Officer at the Janpad level. But then this again is a matter of direction not being enforced!
The MIS data entry is one key deterrent against the scheme going foul. Though the expenditure is being done at full speed in the district, the MIS data entry is lagging behind. When the whole of the data is fed into the software, multiple inconsistencies are sure to be reported. At the district level, the information about ongoing and shelf of projects is not being maintained. At all levels statistics is preferred to information. The reports from the blocks are always of the nature that a hundred Kapil dharas have been sanctioned. The exact locations of these sanctions and beneficiaries are unknown at the district level. How does this affect the system? The wells get dug first by machine and then they are included in the shelf of projects. Thereby, during the act of digging there is nothing illegal. If caught, the well is a private well being dug by a JCB; and if not caught it gets accounted in the name of labourers.
There is a guideline that the payments to the labour should be given on a day with sufficient prior advertisement. This direction is again not followed. There is a direction that the labour payments be made through bank accounts. This is in consonance with the RBI effort for hundred percent financial inclusion. This is again not done and the men at helm themselves seem to be averse to such an effort just before the election. On record he fears if there will be delay in payments to the labourer; but off the record, there is no surety that the payment is happening through the Gram Panchayat now. In fact there are multiple complaints of payments not happening on time. Plus such an arrangement would mean that the payment to the election needy would be considerably hampered!
The physical work is what the local politicians are all behind. They want a talaab sanctioned and so do they want puliyas and stop dams. No worry if they do not conform to the 60:40 unskilled labour to material ratio. The Engineers are always kind enough to certify that all pucca structures can be built with 60% unskilled labour. Well, this is not the only way they fool the system! The most typical effort in this direction is over estimation. Estimates are sanctioned for five lakhs when they know fully well that the work can be done for three lakhs; and what is worse, the work gets done with even less and the talaab just gives way when the water refuses to be bribed. So what, even when there is a clear report and a confession, the engineer involved is still in place and the Sarpanch who even added on to his crime profile by employing child labour in the cover up act is given protection.
In an exasperation to spend, money gets thrown around in such a fashion that it is impossible for the real beneficiaries to be benefited. The psychology on demonstration is that if the spending is done, somewhere or the other some benefit will accrue to the intended beneficiaries. This could be accepted as an argument had it not been a façade for deliberate mismanagement to suit ulterior designs!