Arbaaz Khan
New Delhi: NREGA Sangharsh Morcha(NSM) held a press conference at the Press Club of India, New Delhi on 13th April 2023 to mark 50 days of the peaceful dharna by NREGA workers from across the country. The ongoing dharna is in response to the various mechanisms by which the statutes of the NREGA have been subverted by the Union government.
The right to work and the right to timely wages under NREGA fructify Article 21 of the Constitution of India. As such, violations of NREGA’s provisions are a breach of the Constitution and are tantamount to massive human rights violations. For instance, the Union government has not released any funds, more than Rs 7,500 cr, to West Bengal from 26th December 2021 by arbitrarily using Section 27. Wages amounting to Rs 2,762 crores of workers in West Bengal remain pending.*
Raj Shekhar, the national coordinator of the Right to Food Campaign initiated the discussion by outlining the immense challenges faced by NSM in organising the dharna for 50 days. He said, “ that “the space for peaceful protest in the national capital has been barricaded to just 100 metres. It has been harrowing to get police permissions 10 days in advance for each day’s protest using different organisational letterheads.” At the protest site today, Hindu Mahasabha held a protest to build a Hindu Rashtra where protestors were allowed to come in with swords. Alluding to such discriminatory legalism, the moderator, Rajendran Narayanan, faculty, Azim Premji University, added, “ On the contrary, NSM workers faced a lot of difficulty in bringing puppets to the dharna site.”
On this occasion,Sulochana Devi, a NREGA worker from Kangra district, Himachal Pradesh, spoke about the everyday difficulty in using the NMMS app at NREGA worksites and how, this in conjunction with abysmally low wages are discouraging her from doing NREGA work. She said,” Recently, although I worked for 7 days, my attendance was captured only for 2 days. Despite working from 9 AM to 5PM, I only got wages at the rate of Rs 80 per day instead of Rs 212 per day. Ideally, the NREGA wages should at least be Rs 400 per day.”
On the other hand, Lalitaben Badia, a NREGA worker from Panchmahal district, Gujarat, narrated the harrowing accounts of 8 women from her village whose payments were misdirected to somebody else’s account owing to their Aadhaar getting linked to somebody else’s bank account. After several months of running around, spending nearly Rs 2,000 to retrieve their wages of Rs 2,200, only 4 of the 8 women could partially retrieve their misdirected wages. In separate cases, she narrated how the payments of some workers got diverted to a different account owing to confusions around Aadhaar linking with loan accounts. They had to spend more than Rs 4,000 over a period of 4 months before they could resolve the matter. Throughout the process, they had no support from any officials. She strongly condemned the ABPS system and demanded to revert to account-based payments systems.
Following the powerful exposition of Lalitaben Badia, Neeta Hardikar of Anna Suraksha Abhiyan, Gujarat, highlighted how women have repeatedly expressed that NREGA is the safest work option for them. Alluding to budget cuts, she said “by reducing the NREGA budget, the government is compromising on women’s safety. Moreover, budget cuts result in insufficient staff to implement when there are many vacancies. This leads to unreasonable expectations from the field officials and forces the staff to engage in corruption.” The four time ex Member of Parliament, Hannan Mollah, was the last speaker. He condemned the Union government’s apathy for the working class on how the government is killing the programme on the pretext of digitisation and modernisation. By reprimanding the media on its poor coverage of the poor, “the media has totally failed to capture the extent of this issue, and even the protests which have risen against it.” Extending solidarity with the NSM dharna he said “We have to force the government to listen like with the farmers’ protests, which simply did not stop until the government was forced to cave to the farmers’ demands. “
At the press conference, Demand Of NREGA
● a letter that has been sent to the Finance Minister concerning budget cuts, violations of rights due to needless technology interventions such as the NMMS app based attendance system and the Aadhaar based payments system (ABPS)
● 50 worker testimonies on violations of rights due to NMMS and ABPS.
● Ministry of Finance’s own memorandum admitting to shortage of funds leading to wage delays.
● A report of 18 lakh wage transactions that demonstrates how ABPS payments take the same time
as regular account-based payments. ABPS have problems such as diverted payments and
misdirected payments that are unique to ABPS.
● Case study demonstrating evidence of how two women lost their whole life savings owing to
misdirections due to ABPS.