THE MNREGA PUSH
Sitting alongside 1,127 fellow migrant workers on a Shramik Special train leaving Kerala for Jharkhand, Mukesh says that though he is deeply worried about his future, he is relieved that if all else fails, he can still find employment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme (MNREGA). Once ridiculed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a “living monument of the failures of the UPA”—a quote dredged up by former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Twitter—the scheme has become a source of hope for many returning migrants.
Perhaps acknowledging the need for any port in a storm, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman allocated an extra Rs 40,000 crore to the scheme’s Rs 61,500 crore budget for 2020-21. The raise was a hefty 65 per cent; even if you take last year’s revised estimate of a little over Rs 71,000 crore, the raise is 56 per cent, providing, some experts estimate, 100 days work for at least 20 million migrant workers. According to the government, the new budget will enable the scheme to create almost 3 billion ‘persondays’ (number of people times number of days) of work. So crucial has MNREGA become as a
means of providing employment that many states, such as Bihar, with large numbers of returning migrants, are demanding that the number of working days in the scheme be increased from 100 to 200 a year.
Union rural development minister Narendra Singh Tomar ruled out any immediate increase in the number of work days per household, but pointed out that 40 per cent more people were being employed under MNREGA than in the corresponding period last year. He also said that while “Prime Minister Modi did describe the scheme as a monument to the failure of the Congress, his government has not closed it down or weakened it. Instead, as the stimulus shows, the government is committed to making the programme better and using it to provide employment.”
However, the scale of the migrant exodus means that MNREGA, even with its expanded budget, is unlikely to prove a panacea. Average MNREGA wages, even though they are up for FY21 to Rs 202 from Rs 182, are substantially lower than the minimum wages most states pay to unskilled agricultural labour, and states like Bihar, which struggle to provide a fraction of the mandated 100 days of labour to workers under the scheme, will have to create tens of thousands of new jobs for returning migrants.
“A large number of those who are leaving the cities,” says social activist and journalist Soumitra Roy, “will not be going back.” This means that many more will ask to be employed under MNREGA, points out Manas Ranjan Mishra, a former MNREGA advisor in the rural development ministry, “which will put pressure on states to find work for returning labourers as well as those who are already employed under the scheme.”
Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are among states that have embraced the opportunities to provide jobs under MNREGA, with the latter even managing to reduce unemployment to 3.4 per cent in April, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), while India’s overall unemployment rate soared to 23.5 per cent. Almost a quarter of all new MNREGA jobs emanated from Chhattisgarh, with work found for a reported 1.85 million labourers. In Rajasthan, too, says Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, “the numbers of MNREGA workers have increased from 100,000 to 1.2 million in the past few weeks. We anticipate that this number will reach 3 million before long.”
In Maharashtra, hard-hit by COVID-19, there were 40,000 workers enlisted in MNREGA on April 12. Barely weeks later, on May 5, the number rose to 360,000, working on projects around the state, particularly in remote, sometimes dangerous, districts such as Gadchiroli, prone to Naxal attacks. In Odisha, there are plans to increase the number of working days under the scheme, while even in Uttar Pradesh, some 1.47 million workers are employed by the scheme when much of the state is still locked down, with very limited economic activity.
Economist Reetika Khera, professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, says the government’s “allocation of an extra Rs 40,000 crore to the MNREGA budget is a welcome first step. But if all 140 million job cardholders were to get the mandated 100 days of work, the budget would have to be Rs 2.8 lakh crore.” (Which is to say that even the enhanced budget of Rs 1.01 lakh crore will fall well short.) Responding to an RTI inquiry, the Chief Labour Commissioner’s office said it had no information on the numbers of returning migrants, even though it had issued a circular on April 8 to its 20 regional offices requiring the collection of this data. Experts suggest the number could be somewhere between 150 and 200 million, and doubt MNREGA has the capacity to create work for everyone who might need it.
In April, the lockdown meant that MNREGA figures were the worst for over seven years, with only 3 million people, or 17 per cent of those with job cards, given work. In states such as Haryana, Kerala and Gujarat, only 1,005, 2,014 and 6,756 people, respectively, were able to get MNREGA jobs
So crucial has MNREGA proved that many states are demanding that the number of working days in the scheme be increased to 200
in April. Khera argues that MNREGAregistered households should be paid at least 10 days worth of wages as relief. “The government had appealed to the private sector to continue paying salaries even if employees were not at work. The government should lead by example,” she says.
States such as West Bengal and Odisha, among others, recognise the potential for the scheme to provide work and have called for an increase in persondays. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, anticipating the return of 1.2 million migrant workers by June, said it was now essential to “boost the rural economy. Rural Bengal will resuscitate urban Bengal”. Her Panchayati Raj minister Subrata
Mukherjee said the state had “topped the list for utilising MNREGA allocations over the past four years”. West Bengal’s former labour minister Anadi Sahu argues that simply increasing persondays will not be enough, given that MNREGA is focused on sectors in which many of the returning labourers, migrants who had been working in cities, had little useful experience. Sahu also pointed out that flooding the agriculture sector with workers could result in plummeting wages.
The Centre has said it recognises the need to diversify jobs created under the MNREGA scheme, that flexibility and imagination will be necessary once agricultural work dries up. A rural employment guarantee programme, economist Jean Drèze has said, will need to be supplemented with an urban employment guarantee, so that a once-derided scheme might become an essential pillar in the revitalising of the Indian economy. ■
Although average MNREGA wages are up in FY21, they are substantially lower than the minimum wage paid to unskilled agricultural labour
On May 16, at an online event of the India Today Group, Union minister for information technology Ravi Shankar Prasad remarked that those who had problems with the Aarogya Setu app were free to not download it. Prasad’s statement was seen as a big climbdown from the Centre’s May 1 guideline that had made it mandatory for certain categories of individuals to download the contact-tracing app on their mobile phones. On May 17, the Union home ministry reiterated what Prasad had said—that downloading Aarogya Setu was not mandatory. So, after promoting the app as a musthave shield against the transmission of COVID-19, what explains the government’s about-turn?
Government insiders say this was done to avoid a legal confrontation. The Centre’s May 1 notification had drawn the ire of privacy advocates and legal and cyber security experts, who argued that mandatory download and use of the app was illegal. From the government’s standpoint, though, it was well within its rights to do so—the directive was issued under the Disaster Management Act, 2005, which provides the Centre extensive powers. As per the Act, the government, irrespective of any law in force (including overriding powers), can issue directives to any authority in India to assist in disaster management. “The Disaster Management Act may come to our rescue, but proving the efficacy of the app in directly fighting COVID-19 will be a headache,” said an official on condition of anonymity. “Besides, this may also get entangled in questions about the right to privacy.”
The app, conceived by NITI Aayog and developed by two private firms, was launched on April 2. NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, one of the strongest proponents of the app, claims it has helped identify more than 650 COVID-19 hotspots. “It had predicted about 130 hotspots at the sub-post office level between April 13 and 20. Later, the health ministry declared these predicted hotspots as real hotspots,” Kant said.
Independent observers have, however, pointed out that the app is heavily dependent on self-assessment and may not provide accurate information. While it informed users about the number of Covid patients in their vicinity, the big data generated by the app cannot be processed the way it is expected to be. As reported by india today, instead of Aarogya Setu, many districts magistrates have been using other independent apps to keep track of the spread of COVID-19 in their areas. “We wanted users to understand the need for downloading it. But making it mandatory was having the opposite effect,” says Abhishek Singh, CEO of MyGov and the National e-Governance Division. He adds that some “flaws” were noticed too. “In some cases, users kept screenshots of the results of selfassessment, which had declared them safe, and used it repeatedly. Many users deleted the app after downloading.”
The government also came under attack from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-affiliated Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM). The SJM charged that the Aarogya Setu app was promoting four e-pharma companies—1MG, PharmEasy, MedLife and NetMeds— and posing a threat to neighbourhood pharmacy shops. “A link on the app goes to an e-pharma platform that has four companies. These are foreignfunded firms offering discounts on online purchase of medicines and other health products,” says Ashwani Mahajan, SJM national co-convenor. What irked the SJM further was that Kant had promoted these e-pharma companies through a Twitter post.
The Aarogya Setu app has also been under the lens for allegedly violating data privacy. Earlier this month, the app allegedly exposed some users’ data, including their location, to YouTube. Robert Baptiste, a French cyber security analyst who takes the pseudonym ‘Elliot Alderson’ on Twitter, claimed he could access details of COVID-19-infected individuals through the app.
MyGov’s Singh has said that Aarogya Setu’s privacy standards conform to the draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, pending in Parliament. Interestingly, Justice B.N. Srikrishna, who headed the panel that made the first draft of the bill, termed the government’s directive to make the app mandatory as “utterly illegal”.
Despite the government’s assurances and its retraction on mandatory use of the app, data security experts remain wary. Software Freedom Law Centre, a New Delhi-based digital rights advocacy group, asserts that Aarogya Setu remains a closed-source app. The app prohibits reverse-engineering of the backend source code, which means independent researchers cannot ascertain the veracity of official claims that the app is only doing what it is meant to. The government’s principal scientific advisor, Professor K. VijayRaghavan, had said that Aarogya Setu’s source code would be made public in the near future. That has yet to happen.
THE APP HAS DRAWN FLAK OVER ALLEGED PRIVACY VIOLATIONS. EARLIER IN MAY, IT ‘EXPOSED’ SOME USERS’ DATA TO YOUTUBE