NREGS: Work only a means of self-selection , not of earning

The debate on whether the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) should pay the minimum wage or not misses one essential point: this is a dole dressed up as an employment scheme. And there is a specific logic behind the choice or raiment: it ensures self-selection by the poor, who alone would be willing to perform manual labour to receive the payment available under the scheme. To argue that beneficiaries of MGNREGS should receive the minimum wage is like arguing that a homeless man who has discovered the discarded robes of a judge is now qualified to deliver judicial verdicts or that all those who wear handspun cotton are paragons of non-violent virtue . Clothes maketh the man is an adage that emphasises a point through exaggeration.

It is not meant to be taken literally. The Karnataka High Court ruling that NREGS should pay the minimum wage made the error of confusing form with content. At the very outset, the NREG Act makes it clear that its purpose is to enhance livelihood security . That it is different from regular work is clear from two things: one, the scheme also offers an unemployment allowance, in case the state government fails to provide the asked for relief; and, two, it seeks to target households , rather than individual workers, to spread the benefit around. Regular work would neither offer unemployment allowance nor bother about how many people turn up for work from the same household. Two other factors militate against offering the notified minimum wage under the scheme.

In many states that lack the will or the means to enforce any kind of labour welfare, the notified minimum wage has been ratcheted up repeatedly, just to increase fund transfers from the Centre. Such devolution by artifice would not take place, if the scheme wage is kept separate from the minimum wage. Further, it is legitimate for NREGS to raise the market wage, where it is abysmally low, by offering reasonable remuneration, but it would be ruinous for the scheme to displace rather than merely supplement regular work. For the scheme to work as it is intended to, it must have flexibility as to the wages it offers.