'We will make social audit compulsory for NREGA scheme'

The amendments to the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, along with the new Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2008 (R&R Bill) was supposed to rid state governments of the role of acquiring land for private industrial projects and come up with a non-exploitative resettlement policy. That was not to be, as the amendment and bills got referred to a Group of Ministers (GoM) for the second time. Minister for rural development Raghuvansh Prasad Singh speaks on the way forward.

The amendments to the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 and the R&R Bill have been extensively examined by a GoM and the standing committee of Parliament, but now the whole issue has been referred to another GoM. What exactly is the reason for this?

Well, the standing committee report and the bills and amendments proposed by the ministry differed on very significant points. We agreed on several points but we also disagreed on many. For example, we proposed that when a private company proposes an industrial project, it would acquire 70% of the land required on its own before asking for the state���s help in the remaining acquisition and that too if issues of contiguity are involved.

The standing committee, on the other hand, felt that the state governments should have the discretion to acquire all the land required, if they feel the project merits it. All these differences were weighed and the Cabinet in its wisdom felt that the bills should be revisited.


The Parliament session concluded last week was in fact the penultimate session of the 14th Lok Sabha. Don���t you think the Bills will now never make it as legislation, at least in the life of this government?

Of course not, I have every hope that the bills will be cleared. We are yet to constitute a GoM but I feel that it will take no more than a couple of meetings for it to arrive at a conclusion on the Bills. We have already held the widest possible consultation for this and I have personally met Medha Patkar twice over the bills. All this is not in vain. We will take time, but will come up with a set of policies that will have the widest consensus. After all it took two years to bring the NREGA to Parliament.


Talking of the NREGA, one has seen that a charge that has been levelled against the Act is that there has been hardly any creation of permanent assets. As a dole programme, do you think this is incidental to the Act?

Only the anti-rural, anti-poor people can level such charges against a truly welfare oriented programme. Almost 50% of the programme is oriented towards water conservation. Do you know that we have figures to prove that water tables across the countryside have risen significantly? In the urban areas this may not appear to be important. But there is all-round benefit because migration to urban areas has also come down significantly.

In Assam, for example, nearly 50 villages were saved from floods because the NREGA helped build a series of dams for a bargain basement price of Rs 9.5 lakh. As there are two and a half lakh panchayats across the country, how can each one���s performance be the same? There will always be some smart people and also some not-so-smart ones. One should note that even agricultural minimum wages have increased across the board in states, thanks to NREGA.


Since the increase in agricultural wages seems to have angered the powerful farmers lobby, do you expect a political backlash against the UPA government?

The NREGA is only for providing work in the lean season of agriculture. Therefore the farmers cannot blame NREGA for luring workers away from agricultural work. There is also a clause in the NREGA, referring to the state minimum wages Act of 1943 that the wages for NREGA have to be the same as the states minimum wages.

What has happened is what happens when there is a wider variety of employment available���that is, workers have a choice. Farmers should also look at the flipside, they may have to pay more but migration has been slowed because of NREGA and therefore there is agricultural labour available in the countryside.


The CAG report was quite scathing over the implementation of NREGA. Are you taking any steps to counter that impression?

We are making social audits compulsory, and have almost finalised procedures to ensure that gram sabha meetings be videographed. What this will do is ensure that there is a working gram sabha in place, and the NREGA fund is spent after adequate debate and preparation.