Sridevi Devnand’s perspective on MGNREGA – the voice of a MGNREGA worker:

This week we thought you all may like to hear what those impacted by MGNREGA feel about this Act and the rights it entitles them to. 

Over the next few months we hope to share more of their stories with you. Do let us know what you think.

Sridevi Devnand lives in CK Palli and in her household, including herself, there are two members with job cards and who demand work under the MGNREGA Act.

Last year this household demanded 100 days of work. While they didn’t receive all the days they demanded between the two they got a total of 88 days. This total of 88 days is higher than the average number of MGNREGA work given in Andhra Pradesh and much higher than other states. As a result of these 88 days they recevied a total of Rs. 9,680 in wages from MGRENA.

MGNREGA has had an important impact on the quality of life for this household and what the members of this household are able to afford. As a result of income generated from MGNREGA work, 

Sridevi says that, “In the last few years we have bought a cycle, both of us have bought cell phones, we eat meat more often.”

An additional and very important impact of MGNREGA has been its effect on women, something 

Sridevi can talk to as woman, “In MGNREGA we are not treated as coolies, we work when we want to and not when the land owners want us to, and we get the same wages as men.”             

At the same time Sridevi was clear to voice her dissatisfaction with the work. The soil for which the work had to be carried out on was very hard, therefore Sridevi was unable to earn the defined MGNREGA minimum wage of Rs 145 and only earned Rs 110 per day. In addition, the one main problem she has with MGNREGA is the delay in payments, a problem echoed by others as well.

It is clear that Sridevi understands what rights this Act gives to her. When asked if she received any other rights under this Act, aside from work, she stated that, “We don’t allow contractors or machineries to work in MGNREGA, we receive travel when work is over 5 Kms away, we have medical kit, water, and shade at the work site.”

When asked about the role of YIP facilitators in accessing work under MGNREGA, Sridevi said, 

"They first organised our SSS groups into Gram Panchayat Samakhayas (GPS) and started holding monthly meetings with us to solve our problems. They also visit us when we need them."

In addition, she saw a need for the continued role of these facilitators in enabling her to to demand her rights, saying that, 

"it is not just a question of rights, it is also a question of leadership. Because they are from outside of our  groups they can instil discipline in us, otherwise we will just end up fighting"

Sridevi had a resounding yes for the continuation for MGNREGA as it gives a right to a 100 days of work for households like hers. Her support for this is Act also stems from the control households like hers have over being able to demand and access this work and the conditions under which they receive it. 

Is there a Road Map Once a Rights Struggle is Legislated?

This week, we look at what roadmap has worked for Young India Project over the years in helping households access their rights

Once a rights struggle starts there are certain logical steps it has to go through. Though the first step is getting the Act legislated, which in itself is a long struggle and can involve a number of different steps and pressure points. This is something we can come back to through showcasing what role civil society has had in helping get rights legislated in India. 

Once a right is legislated, the steps involved are: 

• Make a training manual of the act and start training the poor families on the rights given them by the act  
• Organise them into village based unions; 
• Identify the authority to whom the struggle has to be directed: 
• Land and house sites struggles against the revenue department, 
• Bonded labour against the District Collector, 
• Right to work against the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), 
• Right to food security against MRD; 
• Select the most appropriate strategy/strategies to conduct each struggle; 
• Continue each specific struggle until the concerned families have received their demand e.g. once the 6oo families had received their land deeds for 1500 acres their struggle was over, it is their struggle not yours; once the women received the house site pattas on their names their struggle was over, the same with bonded labour; 

Once the Government has conceded the demands made by the families who are undertaking the struggle the NGO must withdraw. But the NGO may continue to support other families who are struggling for the same demand.

Part 2 - Responses to questions raised from YIP's article in Civil Society magazine (2015).

One of the questions we have been asked is whether Civil Society has a mediation role between MGNREGA workers and the State Government to help enforce these rights.

In this post we respond with a resounding YES, CIVIL SOCIETY DOES HAVE A MEDIATION ROLE BETWEEN RURAL WORKERS AND THE STATE GOVERNMENT TO HELP ENFORCE THESE RIGHTS!

In 1983 when YIP started land struggles under various land reform acts, our investigations revealed that there were thousands of acres of Government, shotriamdar, or lands declared surplus under land ceiling that were being cultivated by landless families, but were registered under the names of the bigger landowners and their friends and relatives. The land reform Act that made cultivators into owners of land had been legislated years earlier but the poor had not been able to enforce the rights given by the acts.

Why not?  Because:

A.    They did not know the act and therefore did not know what to do to enforce their rights.

B.     They were not organised to challenge the landowners on whose names the lands were registered.

C.    They did not have the confidence to talk with the Government officials. The situation remained unchanged until YIP intervened in 1983.

The reason why YIP intervened was because many landless peasants approached us as they were not able to get bank loans against their lands. When we asked them why, they answered that though they were the cultivators, the owners were rich landowners and their friends, and therefore being non-owners they did not have the right to mortgage their lands to the bank in order to get loans. 

The very first struggle we took up was for 1500 acres of Government land being cultivated by 600 poor families from 5 villages that had been illegally registered on the names of well-off non-cultivators. We organised the families into five village unions, informed them about their rights and guided them to start their struggle. It took 7 years to get all the 600 families their land title deeds for a total of 1,500 acres. Once they received their ownership documents our involvement with them ended, but in the meantime our cadres were already involved in other land struggles.

Between 1983 and 2000 we helped 42,000 landless families to receive ownership titles to 79,000 acres. These struggles were against the landlords and the local Government officials, but we had the support of the senior IAS officers who were pro–poor. Had YIP not intervened 42,000 families would not have gotten ownership of the lands they were cultivating.

While we were taking up land struggles we also started struggles on bonded labour and house sites given by the Government to be registered on the names of women. By 1985 we were working in two districts and by 1990 in 6 districts. We spread our rights movement to all our working districts. Between 1985 and 2000 YIP workers identified and assisted 540 bonded labourers to be released from the clutches of landowners, and 100,000 women agricultural labourers received house sites on their names.

In each case after the struggle was successful YIP cadres withdrew and started assisting other households to take up their rights struggles. In the Indian rural context, without the mediation of civil society, enforcement of the rights of the poor, by the poor cannot  happen.

Part 1 - Responses to questions raised from YIP's article in Civil Society magazine (2015).

Since 1983 YIP has been involved in mobilising rights struggles of the poor peasantry in Andhra, i.e. over 31 years. The successes of these struggles enabled YIP to take up the struggle on MGNREGA. Recently YIP wrote an article of our experiences to date regarding our work on MGNREGA, which was carried in the magazine Civil Society. A few of you had some important questions in response to this article. Over the next few weeks through our blog we will try to address these questions, anchoring the responses in the lessons we have learnt from the past struggles.

Your feedback and comments are very important to our continued work in this area and we welcome them. Please continue your engagement on this.

DO RIGHTS STRUGGLES START WITH CIVIL SOCIETY?

One of the central questions you asked was around the role of civil society initiating the struggle for a particular right. In response, it is first important to recognise that all rights struggles whether to demand a new right or to implement an existing right is area or country specific. Civil society in India took up the struggle of the right to work in 1986 and continued it to 2005 when MGNREGA was legislated; we had no idea if we would ever succeed. This struggle has only taken place in India, though there are unemployed in every country, why?

Civil society started this struggle, then Ms. Sonja Gandhi and the left parties put it to vote, placing the right to work on their agenda and got it legislated. Civil Society has played an important role in the legislation of MGNREGA and therefore it feels that it is responsible to ensure that MGNREGA is implemented in accordance with the rights given under the Act more so than the Government or the Congress party. In the context of rural India civil society is needed to demand the legislation of pro-poor acts (if the legislations do not exist), and ensure the rights based implementation of each such Act

This is a responsibility and not a choice.

For next week we will look at whether civil society has a mediation role between rural workers and the state government to help enforce this right.

Being Unique is better than Being Perfect - APNA a Unique Achievement

Andhra Pradesh NGO Alliance (APNA)

20 Years of Struggle  - 4 Years of Dialogue - 2 Years Sharing Knowledge - 3 Years scaling milestones

Our position on development of the poor and oppressed is not only theorical but based on years of experience. Since 1982, we have only taken up rights based struggles: for land, water, house sites on the name of women, freedom from bondage, child rights, struggles for justice under Atrocities Act. , participation in panchayat elections under Panchayat  Raj Act 

In 1986 we started the struggle for Right to Work 

The struggle lasted until 2005 when the Central Government legislated NREGA. In September 2006, the Government requested YIP to conduct the very first social audit in Andhra Pradesh with the help of Aruna Roy. The audit showed up quite a few problems, but the major issues were fraud in implementation of the act and the rural poor were uninformed about their rights. In 2007, the government decided to focus on frauds only and increased the usage of Digital Technology and made Social Audits mandatory every six months. In Feb of 2008, the Principal  Secretary  of Rural Development approached us and asked us to demonstrate to the Government. how to inform rural poor about their rights and organise them to demand their rights. We undertook training and organising of rural in 21 mandals  of Anantapur District for two years. 

On 22 nd. September 2009  600 MGNREGA union members met with Mr. Raju Principal Secretary along with all senior officials of Anantapur ,and stated that the Government will adopt the YIP approach to enable the workers to demand their rights.

Mr Raju was transferred to Delhi but his successor Mr Subramaniam called a meeting of fifty rights based organisation in Feb 2010 and asked how YIP had been organising  the rural poor.  We explained that we hold rights training sessions for the rural poor, organise them into village level federations, and hold monthly meetings of each village federation to discuss and solve their problems. Impressed by our work and taking into consideration our recommendations, Mr Subramaniam  passed  the Government Order No. 80 to form a State level Partnership between the  Government of Andhra Pradesh  and  NGOs. Thus APNA was born.  Its purpose was for NGOs to train rural poor, then organise them, and lastly conduct their monthly meetings.

340 NGOs joined APNA by January 2011, and in March YIP  demanded that the Government to pay the NGOs to conduct rights trainings. We succeeded in createing this unique partnership.  APNA became a permanent institution to help the working families to access their rights with the NGOs playing the major role but this is not happening in any other State except Andhra Pradesh. We believe that there can be no development except through rights.  I share with you my recent article in Civil Society Magazine published from Delhi on YIP role in creating APNA and the idea of a Government - NGO Partnership across the country for a better implementation of Rights.  Please review the article and post your suggestions.

The Success Story (click on this link)

Keep refreshing . . .  I will be back with more

Happy Reading!!  

In Search of a New Destination as the Journey continues....

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects . . . 

There's nothing as exciting as a comeback, remember this: classics never make a comeback. They wait for that perfect moment to take the spotlight from overdone, tired trends. I or YIP was just waiting for this perfect moment.  You will now see me often offering you food for thought but before I share about my recent work I thought it will be worthwhile to take a quick walk down the memory lane 

1976 Preparing the Ground

1990 - Cultural Action

1992 - Activities Meeting with the Minister Rural Development

1992 - Cultural Event Chitoor 17k people

1993 - Mudigubba RTW March

1994 - Educating on RTW

2006 - Training the Cardres

Dec 1990 - Meeting with Professor Dandawate Delhi

Relish this and start talking . . .  I will be back with update on the real work, we are doing.

Only enforcement of rights can control fraud.

Only enforcement of rights can control fraud:

Young India Project (YIP) has become convinced that by not enforcing their rights, the MGNREGA Job Card holders are allowing frauds to be committed by officials in the mandal implementing machinery.

In the MGNREGA Sameeksha presented on the 14^th of July by the Prime Minister, he pointed out that he was “surprised to hear from Jairam that concurrent evaluation processes are not in good shape”…and that he will “request Montek to apply his mind to making good the deficiencies…” The Government seems to have total faith in the top down evaluation/monitoring processes even when they are not producing results. Why can’t the Government also, alongside the top down approach, establish a grass roots bottom up evaluation/monitoring approach?

Mr. K. Raju, Joint Secretary, NAC, New Delhi, had a telephone talk with me on the 12^th of July after returning from his meeting with the PDs of Andhra Pradesh in Hyderabad. He told me that in his opinion “APNA NGOs should focus on MGNREGA given rights for the next six months,” to ensure that the SSS groups access their rights.

Because of the formation of APNA, a GO-NGO partnership, A.P. is the only state in this country today which can implement a bottom up evaluation/monitoring process with the help of the APNA NGOs.

On the basis of this YIP has submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Rural Development A.P., to appoint monitors nominated by APNA NGOs, in mandals where they are working to conduct rights monitoring and redressal meetings, every two months in each of their GPs/Habitations and submit reports to APNA. Enforcement of rights through these meetings will check fraud.

The time has come to try a bottom-up approach to monitor rights being accessed or not being accessed, in order to reduce frauds being committed by members of the Government implementation machinery.

After 6 years of Government top down monitoring approach, grass roots bottom-up approach to be operated by APNA NGOs at a far less cost deserves a chance. What is there to lose except frauds?