Increasing work on individual land under MGNREGA a boon to rural income?

In total, around 6.41 million works under individual land has been undertaken in 2021-22 financial year, of which Bihar leads the pack.

The share of works done on individual land in total completed works under the flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme has jumped exponentially by 73 per cent between 2014-15 and 20121-22, prompting several commentators to infer that creation of such assets could have a positive impact on productivity and rural incomes.

Works under individual land have been permitted since 2009 but have undergone numerous modifications since then to ensure that the provision is not misused by big landlords in rural areas.

The data sourced from the MGNREGA website shows that in 2021-22 most of such works at the Gram Panchayat, Panchayat Samitis and Zilla Panchayats have been undertaken in Bihar, followed by West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.

In total, around 6.41 million works under individual land have been undertaken in the 2021-22 financial year of which Bihar leads the pack.

Building of households’ assets such as vermicomposting pits, farm ponds, horticulture plantations, animal sheds, etc is permitted on individual land, in which the beneficiary gets both the labour and material costs.

The maximum number of works have been undertaken in building farm ponds on individual land, several experts said.

So what are the guidelines for undertaking MGNREGA work on individual lands?

For undertaking MGNREGA works on private land, there are several guidelines. A few of them are as follows.

The guidelines state that while undertaking MGNREGA works on private land, there should be a special focus on vulnerable households and communities while preparing estimates for anticipated demand, a list of works on individual land, and a list of other works that provide direct individual benefits.

The Convergent Planning Exercise shall make use of automatically-included and deprived households of SECC to ensure full coverage of poor and vulnerable households.

That apart, the materials required for the individual works on private lands such as farm ponds, dug wells, IHHLs etc may be procured by the beneficiary households at the rates approved by the competent authority, from any vendor having TIN number.

The procured material should be stored properly and the quantity to be entered in a stock register.

The material consumed and the material remaining should also be recorded in the stock register.

For all such works, priority has to be given to watershed management in an integrated manner.

However, not everyone is convinced that using MGNREGA for building private assets boosts rural incomes or productivity.

Debmalya Nandi from the MGNREGA Sangharsh Morcha, an organization working for the rights of MGNREGA workers, has said for long that while it is true that in the last seven years more emphasis has been given to individual works (category IV works as it is called technically), but if the data is taken from NREGA website then it is highly questionable as all assets closed in MIS may not indicate as completed assets.

“They close schemes on MIS as and when there is a need to close them on the MIS, even without the assets being physically completed. So, the data available on closed assets on NREGA will never provide a true picture of physically completed assets,” Nandi told Business Standard.

“Now having said this as I mentioned earlier it is true that a lot of emphasis has been given to assets on individual land in the past few years. Assets like Farm ponds, land levelling, and animal sheds have been constructed at a large scale across the country. One can’t say much about the quality of these structures without doing a physical survey on the ground. Like in 2016-2018 in Jharkhand a lot of farm ponds (commonly known as Dobha) were constructed; however later it was found that many of those were not constructed in the right kind of locations and many had very poor qualities,” he added.

He said NREGA should be looked at primarily as an employment generation programme from a worker's rights perspective but the larger imagination being it will contribute to transforming rural economies through solid and quality resource generation for the families.

“It has been demonstrated through many efforts in many pockets that proper planning and implementation of assets does lead to economic empowerment of households and contribute to their income enhancement, in many areas where watershed models have been adopted properly or upland treatment has been done in a proper technical manner using NREGA, the water table has gone up in 5-7 years of time.   But, here too, the matter is tricky since many times, while the Government goes all out for asset creation it completely ignores the aspects of worker's rights, the right to access work as per their choice and the right to access payments within 15 days of payments,” Nandi said.

Now, coming to the individual asset creation part, it is definitely a welcome move to have more individual assets created under NREGA but the lack of community assets planning and execution does reduce the scope of work at large.

A 30ftX30ft farm pond won’t be able to generate as much work as a large community pond would.

Remember the photographs of old NREGA worksites, where huge numbers of people used to work in large community ponds or community assets, kutcha roads, etc? You will hardly find such a situation in villages these days.

“The counterargument to this could be that large community assets attract more corruption but anyways leakages still exist in big ways and it can’t be related to the size of the structure, it is a matter of administrative malpractices and that will remain unless we solve systemic issues within the bureaucracy. Also, NREGA will be run in the right spirit only if large community participation happens through decentralized planning, large work demands and large workforce participation, that’s essential. So, it is important to strike a balance between community assets and individual assets. Specific schemes like the convergence of Toilets, AWCs or PMAYs, rural haats etc. to NREGA is just a bad idea since it completely violates the law and can’t be implemented through a worker-driven mode,” Debmalya said.

He also discounted the view that the creation of individual assets leads to rise in incomes on the grounds that without doing a proper multi-state study on the creation of assets (completion, quality of assets, type of assets) and utilisation of assets in order to do income generating activities, it will be an exaggeration to place it like that without a deep study in some pockets.