| Guaranteed Employment or Sustainable, Job-led Development? Ashok Khosla If there has been one message that these pages have tried to set out repeatedly and consistently over the past 20 years, it is that the most basic need of our people is livelihoods. Sustainable livelihoods. And that if society has one responsibility, it is to create the conditions under which everyone can create or get meaningful, remunerative work for him or herself. In all its efforts, the Development Alternatives Group has placed this goal at the top of its own agenda and done all it can to bring it to the top of the nation’s agenda.
So one might imagine that the enactment of the National Employment Guarantee Act would be the cause of great celebration at our office. In one sense it is: the needs of the poor for jobs have at last been recognized at the highest level and the responsibility of government to do something about these is enshrined in the nation’s legislation.
But, from the beginning, Development Alternatives has also been an ardent promoter of systemic, sustainable solutions. The three primary attributes of a systemic solution are, first, that they address root causes; second, the structures designed to deliver them are realistic and capable of overcoming attempts to subvert them; and third, they build the capacity of people to take responsibility for their own lives instead of increasing the sense of dependency that has killed so much of the spirit of our nation over the past 50 years. For solutions to be sustainable, they must be resource conserving; they should be capable of quickly becoming self-financing; and they should use public money as front-end investment in the systems and structures needed rather than as operating expenditures,which need to be continued as long as the “solution” is being administered.
The design of effective, systemic and sustainable solutions is not easy in a democracy, where many different political forces have to be balanced and time horizons are determined by the next election. Nor is it easy in a poor country where the other demands on national budgets are multifarious, urgent and powerful. But it is in a low-income democracy like ours that they are most essential. The EGA is criticized by those who do not believe that the poor should “hijack” the national agenda. It will take away funds from “more important infrastructure projects”, they say; it will lead to inflation; and it will lead to more corruption. While some of these assertions might be more valid than others, they largely reflect the viewpoint and interests of the class of people who have benefited most from the new economy and naturally want to maintain the status quo.
But, as the last election clearly showed, for the vast majority of the electorate, the status has lost its quo. The people who got left behind, and who happen to be many times larger in number than those who are doing very well in the new economy, are demanding at least a small portion of their share. However, even the people who got left behind and in whose name the EGA was enacted don’t appear to be too happy with the new Act. They are worried that much of the money will disappear, as it has done in all previous programmes, long before it reaches them. They have doubts on how well they will be able to exercise their entitlements and deal with bureaucrats and contractors to get their rights under the law. They have enough experience with local panchayat politics and district administration practices to be concerned whether they will get a fair deal, either in being assigned work or getting paid adequately for it. Above all, they are skeptical about a “scheme” which has the possibilities of failure on so many fronts, complete with readymade excuses and alibis to justify all of them.
Our recommendation is that with such large amounts of money (some Rs 40,000 crores, growing every year) and so many livelihoods and lives at stake, a small part of the funds – say 15 %) should always be set aside for trying and testing innovative methods, in this case to create livelihoods and jobs with the purpose of helping evolve better, more systemic and sustainable solutions for future years.
Over the years, we have suggested innovations that would address many of the criticisms made at both ends of the political and economic spectra, the left and the right, the rich and the poor:
--- Selection of works to be carried out (assets to be created) must involve the workers and their gram sabhas, and not left to politicians, administrators or contractors
--- Choice of technology must aim at improving productivity of the labourers, but not be such as to displace them from work
--- Design of management systems must not only ensure that all those who want work can get it, but monitoring and adjudication by independent civil society organizations and designated ombudsmen helps them get quick redressal --- EGA money should be used as capital to build opportunities for creating permanent jobs (as in DESI Power, TARA, TARAhaat) rather than as operating expenditure
--- Financing of EGA should maximize the use of innovative mechanisms like CDM, where international funding for carbon emission abatement could bring as much as $ 250 annually per hectare of wasteland replanted, creating one permanent job and large downstream revenues. With 130 million hectares of wasteland out there, this could also significantly reduce the burden of the EGA on the national exchequer. q Back to Contents |