People's Democracy

EMPLOYMENT GUARANTEE

 Not A Job But Right To Live

 Suneet Chopra

THE issue of employment is not merely a question of livelihood today. It is a question of life and death. Under the axe of neo-liberalism, rural India is headed towards a path of ruin. With the removal of quantitative restrictions on the import of agricultural products, the Indian farmer is faced with a kind of competition and speculative insecurity as never before in the history of independent India. The prices of inputs have increased enormously and the retreat of the government from providing basics like seeds, water, electricity and fertilisers has affected the output of foodgrains and rural employment adversely. The cuts effected by the NDA government in rural development funding have forced farmers to rely on moneylenders of all sorts, leading to widespread suicides, distress and sale of assets. If we look at the figures of rural landless, we see that their number has risen from 7.4 crores in 1991 to 10.7 crores in 2001. This works out to some 30 lakh marginal farmers losing their assets every year.

DISPOSSESSION OF SMALL PRODUCER

To make matters worse, earlier the agrarian sector provided some 60 per cent of employment but it went down to 57 per cent in 2004-05. And this employment too reflects worsening conditions of work. While 61.95 per cent were self-employed in agriculture in 1987-88, the figure declined to 57.77per cent by 1999-2000 while that of hired workers rose in the same period from 38.05 per cent to 42.23 per cent. But, even among them, the figure for regular hired labour fell from 3.16 per cent to 1.34 per cent while that for casual labour rose from 34.89 per cent to 40.89 per cent. This reflects not only a decline in job opportunities and the amount of work available but also in the quality of work. In the non-agricultural sector too, we find a similar trend --- the self-employed in the same period came down from 51.21 per cent of the total to 49.29 per cent, while the regularly employed rose from 22.50 per cent to 24.49 per cent. Casual labour remained more or less at the same level --- 26.22 per cent compared to 26.29 per cent. Both sets of figures show dispossession of the small producer as the main trend, as we see from a recent analysis of NSS figures by Shiela Bhalla, Anup K Karan and T Shobha.

To make matters worse, as was recently pointed out by Dr Kamal Mitra Chenoy of JNU, between 1991-2002, the per capita availability of grain has come down by 12.3 per cent. To add to it, 5 to 7 per cent inflation has plagued the period from the last quarter of 2003 up to now.

What is worse is that the cynical approach of a government withdrawing from its responsibility to the people at large has made even schemes for those below the poverty line inaccessible to the poor. According to the government norm of 2004, only those who earn less than Rs 344 a month can qualify for such schemes. This works out to a daily wage of Rs 11, when a bottle of cooled water costs Rs 12. So it is evident that those expected to live below the poverty line cannot even afford water, much less food. They cannot even remain alive, while most of those above this level, who are in fact chronically poor, are eliminated from government relief by a stroke of the pen. And they are over 20 crore people.

FRAGILE SITUATION

In a recent report of evidence brought forward by people during the Rozgar Adhikar Yatra now travelling across Northern India, by The Hindu correspondent in Madhya Pradesh, a woman labourer displaced by the Indira Sagar dam stated: “People could earn Rs 50 a day by selling firewood earlier, but now there is nothing to sell. Widows are left without financial security and we cannot even earn Rs 10 a day.” At the state working committee meeting of Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union, held at Nawashahr recently, district after district reported that during the last season agricultural labour got only 10 days work when they could get over 90 days work earlier. In Punjab, they have been displaced in agriculture by machinery. The economic result of this is not far to seek. As Bhalla and others noted, the growth rate in real wages of male agricultural labour between 1987-88 and 1993-94 and again between 1993-94 and 1999-2000 has actually gone down in Punjab, Tamilnadu, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Orissa while they remained almost stagnant in UP, Gujarat, and Karnataka. Only in West Bengal, Kerala, Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar and Assam did we see growth in real wages of agricultural labour. This shows us how fragile the situation is. Moreover, as women are nearly half the workers in the field, one can conclude that the situation is worse than what the figures indicate, since women are paid half the amount for the same work done as men.

It is not surprising that the ILO report A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour, just released, notes: “In a number of Indian states, the poorest of the rural population have become increasingly dependent on wage labour and appear particularly prone to bonded labour resulting from indebtedness.” What the report fails to point out is how this distress and indebtedness is a direct result of neo-liberal policies that have led to a cut-down of state investment by 2001 to a third of what it was in 1991. The neo-liberal myth was that the private investment would rush into the space left by the state and even overtake it. But the ground reality is that when the state pulled back its hand from investment in rural development, so did private finance, compounding the distress.

A FRAUD ON THE PEOPLE

From this perspective then, the National Employment Guarantee legislation cannot merely be a safety net, it is a necessity for the survival of some 20 per cent of the Indian population. Without such a guarantee, one in every five Indians faces a death sentence thanks to the policies that were initiated during the Narasimha Rao regime (when the present prime minister was the finance minister), followed mercilessly by the BJP-led regime afterwards and now being followed surreptitiously by the UPA government despite the resistance of the rural masses and the watchdog role of the Left.  

I say this because the legislation drafted by the National Advisory Council, nominated by the UPA government itself, has been mangled and perverted to become merely another employment scheme rather than a guarantee. So in its present form the title of the legislation and its content have little in common, reducing it to a fraud on the people. It is restricted to 150 districts and that too, not permanently. It targets only “poor” households and that definition of poverty is in itself a shameful hoax, as noted above. Worse, the draft legislation before parliament actually does away with the necessity of paying even minimum wages for the work done, thus giving a nod to contractors of bonded labour to ply their trade under state patronage. So in the name of an Employment Guarantee Act, we are actually violating not only the Minimum Wages Act but also the Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act. From this angle, this legislation appears to be more a way of legalising the iniquities resulting from the neo-liberal policies rather than eliminating them.

As such, it will be fought tooth and nail by those whose civil liberties this legislation contrives to strip off in the name of providing the guarantee the Indian constitution gives for the right to life. Having divested the small owners and producers of their petty means of production, neo-liberalism now offers them a fraudulent law as a non-existent guarantee.  

THE REAL IMPERATIVES

The legislation must provide guarantee of a minimum 100 days of work for every individual seeking employment within 15 days of applying for it, or be entitled to get unemployment relief. The legislation may not do so immediately but a time-bound procedure must be there to ensure that this is done on a step by step basis. Minimum wages must be paid to all, with equal wages for men and women. At least 40 per cent work must be provided to women, especially of women-headed household. Backward classes, minorities and Dalits must be given work on a priority basis.

The funding for the employment guarantee must be the centre’s responsibility. It is not likely to cost over Rs 25,000 crore annually. And that amount can easily be taken from the beneficiaries of neo-liberalism, big business, who owe the state-owned banks some Rs 1, 67,000 crore as bad debt. Their assets can be liquidated to provide this amount. Or the Rs 86,000 crore that constitute the unpaid income tax can be recovered from the same class to ensure the scheme’s funding. To encourage the states to implement this scheme and provide work, the centre must be duty bound to fund the amount of work a state requires. Also, if central funds are not fully utilised, that state ought to be held responsible for not doing so and be asked to pay employment relief. This relief should be high enough so as not to make it easier for state to pay a dole rather than give work. In any case, the guarantee requires only 1.5 per cent of the GDP, which can be budgeted for with little difficulty --- if the will is there. The panchayat system can be geared to implement this scheme with adequate funds, which can be monitored under the recently passed Right to Information Act.

The proper implementation of this act can be made easier by implementing land reforms in states which have failed to do so and by giving land rights to Dalits and tribal people who form a good 50 per cent of all casual labour. By passing a comprehensive central legislation for agricultural labour on the Kerala and Tripura pattern and improving the provisions of the unorganised labour bill to prevent its use to hire and fire regular workers at will, employers too can be disciplined not to exploit fellow-citizens by using the threat of either working for them or starving.

Finally, it must be remembered that capitalism neither intends to nor will provide full employment. To effectively exploit workers it needs an army of the unemployed so that it may threaten the security of the employed. So every step of the development of an employment guarantee will have to be bitterly fought for. And only organised movements of the working class, agricultural labour, peasants, youth, students and women can carry forward this struggle to a successful conclusion. As such, the content of this legislation, its passage and implementation will reflect our success in organising these sections and ought to provide an incentive for us to do so. Only then can it be a successful step forward in building an alternative strategy of social development based on empowering the working people rather than giving predatory corporates and multinationals the freedom to profit as they please, as neo-liberal economics wants us to do. Neo-liberalism is today sitting on a rotting foundation of the destruction of whole indigenous populations and destroying the environment irrevocably.

Clearly, this latter path of development, being proposed by the World Bank theorists and their friends in our Planning Commission, is neither feasible nor advisable in the conditions of India and many countries of the world today. Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past and try to repeat them pay a heavy price for such oversights. The results of the last election show that the people of India know better than the so-called reformers about the path to be taken to ensure progress in the concrete conditions of our country. The CMP reflects, to an extent, of what they want and the legislations promised in it should be passed with due regard to its intent and purpose. It must not become a smokescreen to cover up the relentless attempts to continue with the anti- people policies of neo-liberalism, the havoc they have caused to our economy and the crisis that looms ahead if they are not altered to suit our conditions. The effort at a movement should ensure that these issues become the basis of consciousness of the masses.