NREGA: A Challenge for Civil Society
Allocating financial resources to the rain-fed areas in the country will result in the country reaping huge dividends; organizing people to use the legitimate space that NREGA allows could be civil society’s way of meeting the challenge of transforming the de-humanizing poverty in rural areas
I f the poor of India were a separate country, they would form the third largest country in the world, according to the World Bank data. And according to the Government of India data, the poor of India would form the fourth largest country in the world. The data also show that 60 per cent of the rural poor are farmers; this means that the poor have lands and they plough it and grow crops. The data on agricultural people show that two-thirds of our farming is rain dependent… rain-fed.
There is zero investment in the rain-fed areas because of the poor techniques of farming. In fact, there is a lot of disinvestment—the cutting of trees and the ploughing of fields that are not worthy of agriculture. Two-thirds of the kheti-badi (farming) is actually in a terrible shape in this country. I have pleaded with the Planning Commission, “Please, please, let’s make some investment in rain-fed areas. Why is it that you can invest more than Rs 2.5 lakhs per hectare of irrigation potential in big dam canal projects such as Narmada or Bhakra?” In those places, for every hectare of irrigation potential that is created—I don’t know the current numbers—the amount some time back used to be more than Rs 2 lakhs per hectare; this doesn’t benefit individual farmers. And I say, “Can we increase the investments in rain-fed areas and the national watershed programmes?” These were launched during the 90s and are under the Ministry of Rural Development now. The rates of investment in these used to be Rs 4,000 per ha; after a great deal of haggling, it was raised to Rs 6,000. Several of us from the NGO community pleaded for it to be made Rs 20,000. After much debate, it was said that the sum would be Rs 15,000; then we discovered that the ministry had already quoted Rs 14,000 to the parliamentary committee, that is, Rs 14,000 per ha for rain-fed areas and Rs 2.5 lakhs per ha for dam canal irrigation!