MGNREGA Implementation in Tamil Nadu: Voices from the fields

Abstract

This article examines the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in two districts of Tamil Nadu—Panchetti and Salem. It describes the functioning of the Act based on a preliminary field study and documents the views of implementers and beneficiaries. This analysis reiterates that the implementation should drive policy and that the evaluation lessons need to filter back to the design of the policy. More specifically, MGNREGA requirements can be improved on two counts: one, wage determination and wage rates; and two, evolving better techniques to measure labour productivity.

Keywords

MGNREGA fieldwork wage determination labour productivity social policy

Introduction

The Government of India legislated Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in 2005 to provide a financial safety net through work to ensure social, gender and economic security in the rural areas. MGNREGA’s design requires that the government provide on demand, “one hundred days of unskilled, manual employment to one adult member of a registered rural household seeking such employment at the rate of ₹100 per day (currently enhanced and linked to the cost of living index)” (Hirway, 2006). It aims to create gender equality and a social safety net, strengthen and improve the environment, improve rural wages by introducing a hiring contest for the workers, reduce economic distress, and reduce rural migration to urban centres (Natesan & Marathe, 2017a). A complex rural scheme, it faced challenges because both, “implementers and beneficiaries, confront political and power circles” (Tadlock et al., 2005; Natesan & Marathe, 2017b). Indeed, MGNREGA’s objective of “providing gender equity and a cultural and social transformative social policy” (Devereux & Sabates-Wheeler, 2004), has received critical appraisal and very harsh evaluation of its implementation (Chakraborty, 2014; Chakraborty, 2007; Hirway, 2004, 2006).

To understand a transformative policy and its implementation such as MGNREGA insights from the fields, referred to as MGNREGA Work-Sites, was a much-required addition to the information gathered from policy implementation literature in general and Employment Guarantee Schemes in particular.

Given the multi-level MGNREGA administration (centre–state–district–village) involved in its implementation, it is pertinent to understand the administrative process of the government and delineate the major stakeholders of the policy. The key stakeholders are the implementers and the beneficiaries, with the other stakeholders, the non-state actors who shaped and guided the policy (the civil society). The Union Ministry of Rural Development and the local state governments, who are the designers and the top-level implementers of the MGNREGA, hand down the rules of implementation to the mid-level implementers, namely the district programme coordinator (DPC) and the block development officer (BDO). Gram panchayats (village councils) and gram sabhas (village assemblies) constitute the third (street) level of implementers. The final stakeholders of the implementation are the beneficiaries. Our fieldwork also placed the non-beneficiaries of the scheme (small farmers, orchid owners, etc.) as stakeholders for the way MGNREGA has affected their livelihoods.

Chronicles from the Field

To explore the MGNREGA’s implementation and impact, a “grounded research approach” was planned. Also called the “constant comparative method” (Glaser, 1965), it allows an iterative data collection and qualitative analysis process. Enabling better in sighting from the field and of qualitative data, it allows constant improvement in the design and focus of the study.

The study involved two field trips—one to Tiruvallur district in Panchetti (the Red Hills), another to Salem district—in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. These two places were picked randomly from the map. The only consideration was to ensure that we would be able to reach these places unannounced. Given that there was travel involved and day trips were relatively easier, and safer, Red Hills was selected. Yercaud was chosen as it was on a mountain top and a different terrain guaranteed some diversity of results. The data collection took place from 2013–2015.

Visit to Panchetty, Red Hills—NREGA Work Site—27 April 2011.

Visit to Salem Visit—Arunootamalai NREGA Work Site—24 May 2011.

Field Visit 1

The first round of fieldwork started with a visit to the worksite at Panchetti, Red Hills, Tamil Nadu. The team met the Lady Field Supervisor S. Sashi, who was overseeing 150 men and women, from the young to the very old. Their work for the day entailed clearing the topsoil of weeds and grass to create a channel for the flow of rainwater.

From afar, the desolate MGNREGA worksite was almost invisible and did not prepare us for what lay ahead. The severity of the harsh sun and the heat is what hit us first, heat and the labour-intensive work next (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Source: The authors.

According to S. Sashi, no selection and worker-targeting are done to get the most indigent of the villagers to benefit from the scheme (Imai, 2007). Anybody who is willing to work is accommodated, the only requirement being that the ubiquitous ration card (a document issued by state governments to enable the holder to purchase subsidised essential commodities from fair-price shops) must be presented for the making of the job card. Universal self-targeting seems to be working well here, with almost all MGNREGA labour being women and old men. For most women, the MGNREGA is a way to augment the household income. The extra income from the MGNREGA work has helped the women provide decent meals to their families. The older women said that the scheme was a “godsend.” It somehow seems reminiscent of—perhaps even consistent with—the identification and replacement of the patriarchal hand with the visible hand of policy (Pateman, 2006).

As per the MGNREGA guidelines, the nature of the work programs is decided by the BDO in consultation with the gram sabha and the villagers. In this manner, while the needs of the villagers are seemingly addressed, we find upon further questioning that the villagers express no infrastructure-based requirement, perhaps because they lack the guidance to make such a selection. Oddly enough, the budget for the work at Panchetti was sanctioned even before the work was decided upon.

One of the main contributions of EGS to the economy is the stabilisation of the wage vector and the provision of a decent living wage to its beneficiaries (Basu et al., 2009; Murgai & Ravallion, 2005). The field visits and the information gathered, however, captured the ambiguity of the concept of wage itself as measured and disbursed by the administrators of the MGNREGA. Though wage disbursement seemed to be punctual, there were glaring inconsistencies in wage settlement and complaints existed regarding the wage amounts. Each worker here was entitled to ₹119 ($2.24) but they were paid ₹85 ($1.60). For the purpose of this essay, rupee to dollar conversion has been calculated assuming 53 for a dollar, closer to the average price of a dollar in 2011.

Since the work entailed creating a channel for a flow of water, the area was divided into small plots of 1,200 sq. ft (30 ft × 40 ft). To clear one plot, 20 workers laboured eight hours a day for five days. S. Sashi, informed that the group dynamics are not constant but shift on a daily basis. Workers in the core group of 20 enter and exit the program according to their convenience. This inconstancy worried a lot of the beneficiaries. Members of the core group generally frowned upon absenteeism. Even though the work was declared completed, the workers were collectively told that because it had overshot the deadline, they would be paid fewer wages than they were entitled to. The decision to dock ₹34 ($0.64) from each worker was made without any scientific effort to judge the contributions of individual workers. In fact, when informed about techniques to calculate wages, the older men and women were astonished that there was indeed a “way” to do so. Worried about how much money they could be losing, they pointed out that they were illiterate and gave their thumb impression when and where they were asked. They were upset that there was no avenue to access information from higher government officials, and that nobody came asking to redress grievances.

A serious charge levelled against the MGNREGA is that of “moral hazard” (Basu et al., 2009) of attenuated entitlements turning beneficiaries against public works. The MGNREGA work has often been described as “digging holes and filling holes” (McCord, 2004). At the worksite, work seemed to move at a snail’s pace. A few unkind words from the supervisor galvanised the labour, but not before a verbal spat erupted between her and an irritated worker. The workers we interviewed openly questioned the wisdom of the MGNREGA in making them do back-breaking labour when an earthmover could do it in 15 minutes at a fraction of the cost. This opens up a wide window of opportunity for better resource management. Although there is a superfluity of labour, their work under the scorching summer sun is rendered both difficult and eventually futile by the fact that the cleared land reverts to natural vegetation in hardly any time.

Jha and Gaiha (2012) have pointed out that registering for work under the MGNREGA is a daunting task for largely undereducated and uneducated rural Indians. The supervisor claimed to help the beneficiaries with paperwork, but our conversations with the workers led us to understand that the process of registration and asking for work is not easy. The illiterate have a tough time in getting the forms filled out. Many cannot finish the 100 days of employment promised by the government. The old and the needy have similar complaints: they want more money for their work, and they want the government to extend the scheme beyond the mandated 100 days. They worry about securing their earnings for the other 265 days of the year. With no other source of income, the MGNREGA is the only hope in their old age. Notwithstanding their several concerns with how the supervisor was dealing with them, the older beneficiaries saw her treating the payments as if they were from her personal account as a personal issue, yet, were very thankful for the work they got.

The MGNREGA’s Operational Guidelines (Ministry of Rural Development, 2013) also provide for worksites within 5 km of the home of beneficiaries, onsite crèches for children, and onsite medical kits. But we saw no childcare being provided. The supervisor said that the children had been left at a crèche facility in the village. The women workers disputed this and said that children were home, alone and unsupervised. The medical kit was at the village office. Although Shanti said that the dwindling medical supplies had remained un-replenished since the day the kit was put together, she took immense pride in informing us that there had not been a single instance of injury on her worksite. In case of an emergency that might necessitate hospitalisation, a private taxi service could be relied upon to arrive even before the ambulance.

Another serious charge levelled against the MGNREGA is that it aggravates the productivity loss among small and midsize rural farms that are unable to pay a competing market wage for labour. These farms lack the financial wherewithal to purchase or hire agricultural machines. They pay low wages, and labour, primarily women, tend to keep away (Khera & Nayak, 2009). This has led to concerns about a massive labour shortage. This seems to hold true as we soon found out. Many women juggle work at the MGNREGA and the farmlands. Some program beneficiaries are, indeed, landowners themselves and manage their own fields (locally called “occupation”). Many of these landowners finish work on their land and then arrive at the MGNREGA worksite. Many women abstain from the MGNREGA work when better-paying employment opportunities become available, even if briefly. Almost all the women interviewed, however, refused to work on private farmland, citing the hard work involved.

On our way out of the site, we chanced upon the former president of the Panchetti panchayat, Rajalingam. A farmer with a master’s degree in rural economics and library sciences and a diploma in labour economics, Ramalingam rued that he cannot do anything but farming. If there are no policy changes in the MGNREGA, he said, agriculture would be a lost cause by 2020, and India would have to depend upon imports to feed its growing population. According to him, the MGNREGA has created a people who want to “do nothing, complain and get money for doing nothing.” Over the past few years, he said, the supply of labour had dwindled to such an extent that he was forced to pluck flowers from his field himself because he was unable to find someone willing to work for even half an hour a day. His contention was that work unrelated to the MGNREGA was considered tough, and women stayed away from it. Even if seeders, ploughs, and harvesters are used for sowing and harvesting, he said, labour is imperative for weeding and clearing. In their absence, land management is not possible. He thought that the MGNREGA was the most “useless” scheme introduced by the government and that it has made people “lazy, lazy, lazy.” Although this is a view only a few hold, it is a significant observation of this exploratory research.

Field Visit 2

Visit to Salem Visit—Arunootamalai NREGA Work Site—24 May 2011.

Our field research next took us to a worksite at Aratumalai panchayat in the Salem district of Tamil Nadu. This worksite has the distinction of winning the “Best Panchayat in the District Award” in 2011. The visit here began with a stop at the Salem Panchayat office. This is where the midlevel implementers of the MGNREGA agreed to be interviewed, but only under promise of anonymity. We shall refer to them as Block Development Officer-1 (BDO-1), Block Development Officer-2 (BDO-2), and Land Survey Officer (LSO).

We met the BDO-1 and the LSO at Salem. He also went to lengths to emphasise that there were no leakages in the MGNREGA work in Tamil Nadu, that workers were paid fair wages, and that payments were made on time. The work specifications at Salem were the same as those at the Red Hills. The Land Survey Officer provided some technical details. During an average five-day period, a group of 20 people working seven hours (with an hour for the lunch break) was expected to clear a plot of 12.1 m × 9 m (or 109.9 sq. m) that was 0.45 m deep. The daily wage, as promised by the government, was pegged at ₹119 ($2.24) per worker. However, BDO-1 informed us, the workers were being paid in the range of ₹85–90 ($1.60) per day. The wage rate was based on labour productivity and the area cleared. Since the benchmark for measuring productivity was absent, this served to highlight the discriminatory wage-setting.

The intended beneficiaries had information about the scheme and were able to take independent decisions whether or not to avail of it. Access to it was not limited or filtered, and wages were disbursed every Tuesday. 80% of the beneficiaries were women. A village of about 100 women working on the scheme received an average infusion of about ₹150,000 ($2,830) per week. The BDO-1 said that the migration of labour had been reduced, which would be verified by the gram sabha.

Both BDO-1 and BDO-2 agreed that the MGNREGA was creating a labour shortage for other works. They spoke about hesitating to take decisions and waiting for instructions to come from the top. They did not respond to queries about the top-down and bottom-up process of MGNREGA’s implementation. When we questioned the LSO outside the office on the methodology of measuring the work done, we were firmly told that “measurement is just done and we should not think about methods.” Clearly here, as at the Red Hills, there was no straightforward way of gauging worker performance, because the core group of 20 is flexible and workers go off work as and when it suits them. The confusing differential between the sanctioned wage rate and the wages paid is difficult for the beneficiaries to understand, and has become an irritant.

The narratives that we pieced together point to wages being the real problem in the MGNREGA. All the way from design to implementation, lack of clarity defines the determination of wages. Since the rural beneficiaries are largely uneducated, this has proven to be a major hindrance in their recognising and fighting for basic rights.

The worksite at Arutamalai, which, as the name suggests in Tamil (Figure 2) the local language, is on the top of a steep mountain. It is located an hour from the panchayat office. On the way up, at about 2:30 pm, the team met two women, Manammal and Amuda, making their way to the same worksite. When we asked them why they were late for work, they said that it would be a lean workday since it was payday. They intended to collect their wages and return (Figure 3).

Figure 2.

Source: The authors.

Figure 3.

Source: The authors.

We found the work here similar to the Panchetti worksite: a vast expanse to be cleared and big boulders to be moved (Figure 4). The beneficiaries complained that the work was backbreaking and asked for a higher daily wage. Payday meant that work shut down after lunch. The workers took their wages and left quickly. We walked back and interviewed him at the foot of the mountain with some other local residents in attendance.

Figure 4.

Source: The authors.

The supervisor told us that the village closest to the worksite has no roads, no electricity, no hospital or primary healthcare centre. All it has is a small primary school. Villagers have to make a trip downhill and uphill for every necessity and emergency. The LSO, who is tasked with measuring work for the entire district on Thursdays and visits only three or four sites, had not come here even once.

The wages paid per person over the past three weeks ranged between ₹80 ($1.50), ₹85 ($1.60) and ₹90 ($1.69). This day, the workers would be paid ₹90 each. The workers were satisfied with the daily wage rate, because further downhill, they would get only a marginally higher ₹100. This worksite kept them from having to trek downhill.

By late afternoon, a large local population had gathered for a discussion. Everyone present had a very definitive viewpoint on the scheme and its implementation. A landowner showed us his coconut grove and told us that prior to the MGNREGA, he paid a male worker ₹200 ($3.77) per day and a female worker ₹150 ($2.50) to clean it for him. Now, however, the supply of female labour had dwindled. Men were now asking ₹300 ($5.66) a day for unskilled work. But labour continued to elude him despite his willingness to pay the higher rate. Forthcoming about his disillusionment, he told us that he was stating facts and that in another 10 or 15 years, India would have to import food if the government did not do away with the MGNREGA. He had started to raise turkeys on his farm to augment his income.

However, the scheme has also raised the wages in the area and given its self-targeting aspect has also given the freedom of seeking jobs to the rural workforce. The team met a mason’s assistant at a private plantation at the Yercaud hills. When asked her why she chose to work here rather than at the nūr-urupiāh (₹100) government worksite (as it is locally known), she said, “The wages are less at the government worksite, and taking time off is not allowed. I work here for four days, earn ₹600 ($11.32), take the fifth day off, and still take home more money.”

Implications and Evaluation

In addition to highlighting the wage and productivity measurement issues. the outcomes of this study confirm the deep power structures operating in the rural areas. The MGNREGA’s beneficiaries are grateful, but remain stymied by the lack of procedural clarity in registration and asking for work, and do not trust the bureaucratic implementation process. The beneficiaries are unwilling to confront the supervisors. Confrontations could result in lost job cards, lack of information about worksites, wage payments delayed—or, worst of all, names struck off the rolls.

There is no gainsaying that while the scheme’s beneficiaries are its ultimate stakeholders, this study also recorded its negative impact on the non-beneficiaries. The absence of a grievance redress mechanism for the non-beneficiaries has sounded the death knell for many small farmers and marginal landowners. Unable to pay farm wages rising because of the MGNREGA, they are exiting farming altogether.

The MGNREGA machinery of implementation works through a prior administrative network—the panchayat system. It has not taken cognizance of the problem of increased workload on existing midlevel officers, the BDOs, who are tasked with executing and delivering multiple policies. They lack the support of technological resources. They do not have the power to set or push agendas.

The MGNREGA was designed as a bottom-up policy initiative, but most guidelines and communications emanate from the top. Accompanied by adequate power devolution, increasing the number of implementers will strengthen the MGNREGA implementation at the grassroots. To make the MGNREGA a truly democratic and efficient project, the focus should shift from top-down to collaborative networks. Despite the fact that it actuates the scheme, the largest rural administrative network in the world is not being used effectively. To create a culture of ownership of outcomes, the BDOs should be given charge of their respective networks, with accountability moderating administrative autonomy. The BDOs informed us that the position of a dedicated Block Programme Officer has been created but not filled. Their two major recommendations are that communications be improved, and that control be handed over to the block, the gram panchayats and the gram sabhas.

The Last Word

To summarise, since the 1990s, social and welfare research has focused on poverty, the reasons behind it, the interdependence of politics and social welfare, and concerns about the reliance that this has created (Katz, 1989; Schram, 1995). It has been instrumental in constructing a narrative between the “state of poverty” to “dependency on welfare” and, subsequently, the very essence of welfare leading to “disincentives to work” (Bane & Ellwood, 1996). The echo of the “moral hazard” of welfare (Murray, 2008) found a place in this field research as well. Additionally, the “system of public patriarchy that welfare creates” (Abramovitz, 1996; Tickamyer, 1995), tends to position women in “the role of dependents” (Ferguson, 1984). As became evident from our conversations with the women beneficiaries of the MGNREGA, there has indeed been a subtle shift, in that the hand of the patriarch has been replaced by the benevolence of the government. Furthermore, Green and Shapiro (1994) said that the goal of reform was to “embody a commitment to a behaviour model that focuses on individual rationality and utility maximization.” The rational individual choice was validated by women electing to work on the MGNREGA worksites when work on private plantations was either unavailable or too taxing, reiterating yet again the “choice of an option, from an array of options that focus on individual rationality and utility maximization.” Our field report amply validates reports of large-scale reliance and use of the MGNREGA by women beneficiaries (Khera & Nayak, 2009; Pankaj & Tankha, 2010), while able-bodied men have gravitated towards, and in some cases migrated for, work in regions and sectors where wages have increased because of labour competitiveness created by the MGNREGA (Basu et al., 2009).

The two field trips provided an ethnographic study of the MGNREGA. The dialogues with the street-level implementers, beneficiaries, and non-beneficiaries helped understand implementation structures with MGNREGA. The immediate results highlighted the inadequacy of labour productivity measures to safeguard the interest of the beneficiaries as well as the arbitrariness of the formula adopted for setting daily wage rates by the implementers.

This study set the base and the information gathered helped set up long-term scales and constructs to study the importance of implementers in implementing MGNREGA. The scales are a part of implementation literature (Natesan & Marathe, 2017b). Additionally, the questionnaire formulated carries the possibility of being amended to study implementation issues faced in other centrally funded policies as well. It is hoped that with the adoption of technology-enabled monitoring systems, implementational challenges would have reduced in the last five years. It is also hoped that the insights developed here will enable new research in this domain as well as open avenues to study implementation issues of other centrally funded schemes.

Despite being limited in its geographical reach, this fieldwork has tried to gain insights into one of the largest welfare schemes ever implemented anywhere in the world. Like the proverbial drop, it adds to the ocean of research, pointing all the while to the need for a study that covers a larger respondent base over a longer time period. Conversations and discussions like these on wages, women, and labour issues, fill the information gap that policy-designers face. These small brush strokes enable information sharing on a large canvas.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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