MNREGA clean-up leaves many jobless
RANCHI: Jharkhand’s bureaucrats have denied thousands of farm workers their legally mandated livelihoods under the guise of plugging leakages in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), say activists.
Earlier this month, HT reported that the Ministry of rural development had cancelled 93 lakh MNREGA job cards, of which 2.67 lakh cards were from Jharkhand, to weed out duplicates and cards corresponding to dead beneficiaries.
At the time, Union rural development secretary Amarjeet Sinha told HT that the cards had been cancelled on the basis of a house-house survey, but activists say that many genuine beneficiaries were also struck off in the process — in violation of established MNREGA regulations.
None of the cancelled cards had been seeded with their Aadhaar numbers, said Binod Kumar of the Society for Promotion of Wasteland Development (SPWD), an NGO.
“This could be a reason for deletion of their names,” Kumar said. The mass cancellation could have been prompted by a desire to increase Aadhaar enrolment rates – a charge denied by local officials.
In a survey conducted last week, SPWD identified 80 people, across four panchayats of Latehar district, who had worked under the schemes in 2016-17 but their names were removed from the beneficiaries’ list.
Sanichar Bhuiyan, 45, resident of Kuchila village in the Betla Panchayat in Latehar is a victim of the government’s erroneous action.
Bhuiyan, however, has no idea that his name was removed from the beneficiaries’ list. Bhuiyan said he had worked in a water body renovation project in 2016-17. Similarly, Sanjay Ram (25) from the same village had worked on a road project in the village. Ram is also not aware of removal of his name from the list.
While MNREGA guidelines state that job cards can be cancelled only after consulting the relevant gram sabha, Sanjay Singh, the headman of the Betla Panchayat, said this procedure was not followed.
“Neither the gram sabha nor I was told about the number of people deleted from the list. No gram sabha was held,” Singh said, “I have urged the block level MNREGA official to add the names of genuine beneficiaries.”
“Names are deleted on three parameters - if beneficiary is fake, permanently migrated from the place or has died. Aadhaar seeding is not a parameter to remove the names,” said N.N. Sinha, Jharkhand’s principal secretary of rural development.
Sinha said they would examine the matter and re-include the names if genuine beneficiaries are found. “We will also take action against the official if anyone found removed the names forcefully,” Sinha said.