Hey all! I regret that I am posting the next leg of the race right after the bit on Jharkhand –which may feel as if you are reading one of those rambling novels instead a series of posts –but before you shake your finger at my delays, know that I haven’t had internet connection this entire week. Having Internet at my fingertips or turning on the TV on Wednesdays and Thursdays to watch So You Think You Can Dance seems like a distant memory I remember with fondness. It is an odd feeling – those comforts manifest themselves in my mind every few days, especially as I try to fight off the relentless mosquitos in vain or go to the bathroom in filthy holes, but I don’t feel an intense longing or insatiable itch to re-immerse myself in those peripheral pastimes.
After leaving Jharkhand on the 9th morning, we arrived in Araria, Bihar that night. Araria is a district headquarter town, less than two hours away from the Nepalese border. There, we stayed with two young activists who astound me in their ability to take up a meticulous and unflattering task in order to push the government to deliver its promises to rural poor. Very sweet, very accomplished, very sharp, and very brave in their resolve to live simply. I could see why my parents had visited them earlier and became good friends. This was the first time on the trip we had stayed with people our family was previously acquainted with, but only for two nights. Then, we were off to the field!
First off, I need to explain the work the couple, Ashish and Kamayani do. They do social audits, reviewing government welfare programs by going hut to hut in the villages and asking specific questions, to see the discrepancies between the government records of how much x was “given” to a person and how much, if any, they actually got. Petty corruption systemically built into the government sponsored schemes to address rural poverty and various medical, educational risks associated with it are omnipresent – few of those in need actually receive the benefits the government said they do.
I don’t want to begin this post cynically, because I do feel the schemes in theory can vitally stabilize a poor man’s life and aren’t a lost cause –they can and must work if the nation seriously contemplates bottom up development and addressing basics like malnutrition. Unlike in the United States, the idea that India is a welfare state is not disputed; no one says get government outta my life, even the right wing nationalists. With the gap between rural/urban, rich/poor, educated/illiterate ominously plunging several backwards through the ages, it seems widely accepted that only a government can provide a minor safety net for these individuals.
Let’s talk about the government schemes. The sangathan – solidarity group that the couple and their rural youth counterparts founded, audits the schemes. One program is MG-NREGA, Mahatma Gandhi (added to EVERYTHING in this country) National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It aims to provide 100 days of work for the landless or marginal farmers whose income evaporates during off-season or who have families and therefore cannot migrate to the venomous slum life of urban cites. The program is directly related to rising food prices (when we stop by marketplaces to buy mangoes or bananas or some vegetables, even we hesitate) in a country where the large majority spend the bulk of their income on food. I cannot convey the anxiety that arises when we realize how expensive basic foodstuffs are. With transportation costs factored in, food becomes more expensive in the smaller town-villages than in Patna! Talk about a subsistence economy. How must the poor survive?! With packaged biscuits and crackers?
The scheme aims to provide labor for public works projects like roads and other infrastructure necessities locally, where the dirt roads between villages and nearby towns are often nonexistent or really shitty, raising difficulties for the sick, pregnant, etc. If the government cannot provide 100 days of work, it is supposed to give unemployment benefits to the workers. Also, the scheme tries to strengthen rural democracy by enabling panchayats (elected village council) to lead the decision making process on public works needed in their villages. There are innumerable problems with the scheme: most receive far too few days of work. Some of the Dalits are completely rejected and cannot secure labor cards, meaning they did not fulfill the precondition for even being in the pool to receive work. Most don’t receive the full wages for work they do. Often projects are stopped halfway due to insufficient funds. In the Baba’s village near Robertsganj, we saw a paved brick road that appeared as a ruby in the midst of such stark deprivation, but it abruptly stopped right on the outskirts of the actual village community, not even reaching most houses. Corruption also usurps the actual pool of funds and most allocated money ends up being spent on bribing officials among the government hierarchy.
There are other problems that hamper the effectiveness of the programs drastically. But still, the few days of wages can sustain a family on the brink of severity for some weeks; it can nourish hungry stomachs for a temporary time. Yet it is obvious government officials have no interest in actually making the programs work and merely engineered the program to provide an illusion of caring about the disempowered. At least now they can say they have something for these people but no longer bother to uphold the façade after the NREGA implementation. So you can see how we are hazily wrestling with these schemes and the process of increasing their efficacy. We find some merit in them but beat ourselves in the head due to the labyrinth of uselessness that arises from observing reality.
However, in Bihar JJSS (Jan Jagaran Shakti Sangathan; the grassroots group Kamayani & Ashish helped found) had initiated a first of its kind social audit of the other government scheme that faced similar issues discussed above.
They added ICDS, Integrated Child Development Scheme to NREGA for the social audit purpose. This scheme addresses the plights of four groups: pregnant women, lactating women, malnourished children, and severely malnourished children to supplement their nutrition through giving chaval and tur dahl, or rice and pulses. The first three groups receive 3 kg rice and 1.5 kg dahl supposedly on a monthly basis (I never actually saw this out of the hundreds of names my group went through). The last group receives 4 kg rice and 2 kg dahl. Also, only 99 TOTAL qualify out of a thousand, and the selection process is arbitrary: we regularly saw poorer women and babies with severely inflated tummies not even qualify for the scheme, when those better off did. So few actually were listed as recipients, and on top of that the large majority either received nothing or a small fraction of what had been written in the records (I will explain the dynamics of this later, there is so much to tell… conveying experiences and feelings of the moments is overwhelming!)
Still, we cannot be so cynical that it impedes us from performing the routinely, often boring tasks of visiting these huts and tallying the numbers to see the actual truth of who gets what and how often. The process can be perfunctory and at first I was really skeptical of this approach of finding how many kg of food random villagers received since we already recognize that there is corruption or that the system is flawed to its core. But there is a huge difference of being an overly critical observer of the government scheme or the process of the social audit led by the couple who do it out of their own volition and aren’t associated with the government, and actually doing the tasks and seeing its enormous merit both for our personal development and broader awareness and attention calling purpose.
