EGA Sabotaged?

It is now learnt from reliable sources that the “revised” draft of the National Rural Employment Act, to be sent to the Cabinet soon and tabled in Parliament in December, has radically diluted some key provisions of the initial draft.

The most important dilution concerns the time-bound extension of Employment Guarantee to the whole of India within five years. This key provision has now been replaced with the following:

“[The Act] shall come into force immediately in such areas and for such periods as may be notified and shall be extended to cover all the rural areas of India after evaluating the implementation in the Districts chosen.”

This is not only a licence to restrict guaranteed employment to a few “Districts chosen”, and to postpone further extension arbitrarily. It also means that the central government will have a stake in the failure of the Employment Guarantee Programme in the “Districts chosen”, to avoid the financial burden involved in further extension.

For good measure, the “revised draft” allows the government to fix the wage rate as low as it wishes:

“Notwithstanding anything contained in the Minimum Wages Act 1948, the Central Government may fix the rate at which wages shall be paid to the labourers employed under the Programme; different rates may be notified for different areas; until the Central Government notifies wage rates, the beneficiaries shall be paid the statutory minimum wages fixed by the respective State Governments for the agricultural labourers.”

Taken together, these two clauses (on extension of the Act and level of wages) make it possible for the Central Government to sabotage the Employment Guarantee Act at any time.

Further details see www.righttofoodindia.org