COVER STORY/MGNREGA
harvested water and use it for irrigation. “We utilised MGNREGA to create assets for the villages while providing residents the much-needed cash through wage. Since the residents have revived these together, there is already a sense of ownership among them towards the water structures,” says Kumar.
In neighbouring Yamunanagar district, where the demand for works under MGNREGA increased by 352 per cent during the four months, the authorities have deployed the workforce to clean and maintain Hathnikund barrage and its network of canals, which divert the Yamuna water for irrigation needs of the district and also to meet the drinking water needs of Delhi. The barrage and its canals were choking over the past five years due to lack of maintenance. “Usually, the irrigation department hhires contractors who use heavy machineries for desilting the barrage. But for the first time, desilting work has been done manually this year to accommodate the high demand for MGNREGA works,” says Gurnam Singh, ABPO of Pratapnagar block in Yamunanagar.
In Punjab, which shares the same fate as Haryana in terms of groundwater, rural development minister Tript Rajinder Singh Bajwa too saw an opportunity in the surplus labour capital. In 2019, the state government launched a drive to revive traditional ponds. The aim was to replenish and conserve groundwater, which according to the 2019 report of CGWB was being extracted at a rate 165 per cent more than the recharge rate through a staggering 1.43 million tube wells. CGWB had
warned that if groundwater continued to be exploited at the current rate, Punjab would become a desert within 25 years. But of the 13,178 targeted ponds, the government could revive only 7,792—dirty water was removed from 5,352 ponds and another 2,440 were de-silted. The works could not be completed last year due to the onset of monsoon. This year, as soon as lockdown restrictions were eased, the government resumed the pond restoration works, but changed the method. “Last year, most works were done using mechanical dredging,” says Seema Jain, finance commissioner, rural development and panchayats department of the state. This year, the government has done away with this provision.
Instead, when the project resumed on May 12, those who had lost jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were roped in for the works. “The number of people employed under MGNREGA in Punjab was 0.15 million in 2019-20. The figure has gone up to more than 0.22 million in the current financial year (till July),” says Jain. By mid-June, 11,071 of the 12,296 ponds targeted for this year were dewatered and 3,176 of the 7,456 targeted ponds were desilted. These works generated 1 million person-days of employment under MGNREGA.
Uttar Pradesh’s emphasis on natural resource management offers migrants a choice to stay