Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan

Resisting the Second Childhood: Towards Universal Pension in India

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:06:33 +0000

Ashiya Begum, an elderly widow in Andhra Pradesh, had worked as a road construction labourer after her husband’s death. She recalls that when all the workers used to have lunch by the construction site, she tried to sleep under the bushes as there was no food and it was better than seeing others eat. When the pangs of hunger grew insistent, she would drink a lot of water and then tie her saree end tightly around her stomach and continue to work. At night if the children cried and she had nothing to feed them, she peeped out of her tent to neighbours’ utensils and used to beg a glass of ganji (water which is to be drained out of rice once it is cooked) from them. Everybody got 5-6 spoonfuls of ganji before sleeping. Sometimes in the evening, after the road construction work, she cooked in other people’s houses. They gave her four rotis that the entire family ate…‘Even if I tell you (what we eat to survive),’ she told the researcher, ‘will you ever be able to feel what we eat?’

- from the ‘Study on Destitution and Hunger’, Centre for Equity Studies, Delhi

Old age mostly inspires the sentiment of the universal in us, the aesthetics of the general, so much so that when we speak of the old, we often let go of the specific and relish statements that tend to be as wide-ranging as they could be naïve: the old are wiser, we say, the age is just a number, our frames turn more literary, more contemplative, it is the dusk of life, we think, or sometimes being metaphorical, we consider to be old to be in a second childhood. The last one is Aristophanes, no less.

It is almost as if we formally link old age with the idea of summing up, always using it to make truistic statements not for a person per say but for a species. Most of the remarks about the elderly end up being an indistinct précis of what it means to be human, generally, as if the old cannot help but be representative of some general malaise. ‘The complete life, the perfect pattern,’ the English playwright and novelist Somerset Maugham wrote, overstretching an abstraction, ‘includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquility of the evening.’ (barf).

It is almost as if to be specific in relation to old people seems an anathema to us. Gerontology can be psychological, we concede, it can certainly be biological, it can even be literary, but we have instinctively arranged it in such a way that it cannot be that which we think of as political, that is, it cannot be about the varying public relationships between people and of people with their collective institutions. The old are made to stand in for all the forces of generality, for the civilizational, for the other-worldly, for the cosmic, but we get our knickers in knots if the old resist this and come to us as full-bodied, this-worldly political creatures.

It was mainly this presumption, one which does not count old people as important political factors, whether as contributors to the national economy or as petitioners to the government offices, that was exploded in the recently concluded Pension Parishad - the 5-day dharna in central Delhi where almost 3000 old people, representing their organizations from at least twenty different States, asked the Central government for a universal, non-contributory pension scheme of Rs. 2000 for all Indians above the age of 55 who are not already covered by pensions of higher amounts. It became more than clear from the first day itself that the campaign was framed not as a plea for charity – something that would have fit well with the benign view of the aged, hinted above – but as a demand for a fundamental measure of dignity and rights for the elderly in this country. One of the major slogans of the Parishad was: ’Har hath ko kam do, kam ka pura dam do, budhape mein araam do’ (‘Give work to every hand, give full pay for all work, give rest in old age’).

Every speech that was made on the dharna stage, every song that was sung, every representation that came from different cities, towns and villages, had one strand running through them: that the aged definitely conceived of themselves within the umbrella of the political, that they positioned themselves as vital actors who were making a considered claim on their own State. These were the elderly who made specific, concrete demands to the members of the Parliament, to the President and the NAC, and who offered them a detailed roadmap of how to go about instituting such a scheme, and who, most importantly, were pushing for a vision of India as a country that would take each of its citizens along in its monumental bid for growth. The protestors were very clear that theirs’ is going to be one of more important campaigns of this decade, one which will decide on the future of India and whether it is able to harness its economic growth to strengthen its social security net and is able to provide food, shelter and other basic means of sustenance to all its citizens, not only to those who are BPL, not only to those who need it most, hence thankfully skirting these thoughtless categories that are increasingly compromising the way we can imagine inclusive progress in this country.

This campaign fills up a major lack in India’s pension economics. The campaigners argue that whereas employment linked pension is restricted to the elderly in the organized sector or to those who are among the rich and upper middle classes, the group that is most in need of old age pension remains without any framework of support in the old age. This is the unorganized sector which has been the backbone of India’s much talked about growth in the last decade. They are the ones who have literally carried it on their backs. There are millions of women and men like Ashiya Begum, who are undeniably at the centre of the process that makes the places in which we live and rest but who mostly inhabit the furthest corners of our concerns. The comforts of the well-off are always based on the strategic appearances and the disappearances of those who work for them: maids, vendors, rickshaw-pullers, cheap construction laborers, among several others. Between the year 2000 and 2010, the campaigners argue, the organized sector added less than 0.3% workers annually to their workforce, while the GDP of the country more than doubled, with the annual rate of more than 7.5%. It is blindingly clear that much of the contribution to this growth came from the workers in the unorganized sector, who would work in the most difficult physical circumstances and without adequate nutrition and rest. The universal pension, that guarantees at least half of the national minimum wages, would be the acknowledgement of the centrality of their work to a nation’s career. It would be a payback, a recognition, not a charity sop.

The campaigners are further resolute about the idea that the APL/BPL categorization has to be avoided to make this pension scheme truly effective. They rely on influential developmental economists such as Jean Dreze who have argued recently that ‘not only is the official poverty line extremely low and, hence, not meant as an eligibility condition for social support, identifying BPL [itself] is very difficult. A BPL Census invariably turns out to be a hit-or-miss affair. Third, someone who is poor today may not be poor tomorrow and vice versa, but the BPL lists are very rigid…Fourth, BPL targeting is very divisive; it undermines the strength and unity of public pressure for a functional PDS.’ This divisiveness of the APL/BPL categories is a massive roadblock especially in relation to pensions. Let us understand how.

First of all, it is never clear that the elderly people are not being neglected even in the well-off households. No BPL census, Dreze argues, can ascertain the distribution of resources within the family. The pension scheme as it stands in India today, restricted as it is by this idea of the poverty line, is neither universal nor adequate. Only one in every five person over 60 years old in India, a number that is hitting against ten crore, receives old age pension, attached as it is to the BPL criterion. This pension can be as low as Rs. 200 in some states and only about 50% of those eligible in our country get it. Further, this divisiveness produces tragic on-ground situations where an elderly person receiving this pittance of a pension is made ineligible for the benefits accorded to the BPL family, such as, if we take the example of Bihar where the pension rate is Rs. 200, an elderly person very often loses out on the Antyodaya scheme on account of being covered under old age pension, necessitating her to pay about 90 rupees more for 25 kilos of grain. Apart from this she also loses out on additional 10 kilos of grain. Such policy barriers can be life threatening for the elderly people living in that kind of poverty. A universal pension scheme that does not deny other PDS benefits is the only way forward to redress such dreadful situations, where sometimes old people have to wait for the deaths of other old people in order to become eligible for the smallest of amounts.

The other major demand that the campaigners are absolutely clear about is that the time for the universal pension scheme is now, that we cannot afford to wait any longer. At a recent television debate on this issue on CNN-IBN, Gursharan Das, the former Managing Director of Procter and Gamble, effectively brought together the opinions of the many who have been resisting even the fledgling welfare policies in India in the name of the ‘fiscal deficit’, he debated this timing of the Pension campaign with its representative Nikhil Dey, saying that ‘we have just been downgraded, the country is in a serious financial crisis right now, we should be cutting back on subsidies… a poor country,’ he said, ‘cannot begin to behave like a rich country’. Then he offered a necessarily far placed idea of when the timing could be right for such a scheme: this, he said, would be when the per capita income in India would be $5000 p.a., at least, till then, he said, ‘you cannot destroy a nation’s culture by creating entitlements’.

Nikhil Dey responded to Das with some obvious indignation but much precision. He offered examples of several low and middle-income countries that have instituted universal or near universal non-contributory old age pension systems. In doing so, he wanted to suggest that which should be painfully obvious to all of us: that there is no linear time-frame which can be operative in regard to this question, that we cannot wait till that mythical ideal time is upon us to institute such a scheme. There are several examples in which such a time-frame used to argue for deferral has been rightfully short-circuited. The country Lesotho, which has a per capita GDP that is about two-third that of India’s, pays the equivalent of 2300 rupees per month to its elderly as pension. Kenya with just half the per capita GDP of India pays over 1250 rupees per month. Even Nepal, with per capita GDP about one third that of India’s, pays a pension of 313 rupees per month to its elderly.

It is clear that we cannot defer this question. Not only have we to answer it now, we also have to add some other vital questions to our basket: for instance, if we say we cannot afford the 2 lakh crore p.a. that would be the cost of running this scheme, then we should begin asking as to how can we make it affordable? We should also ask if we can afford the lakhs of crores we give to the rich MNCs in tax subsidies, and whether, we can afford this entire current regime of taxation which is easier on the rich? We can then think concretely of employing a particular cess on those industries that have been the beneficiaries of the unorganized sector labour to fund the pension for those men and women who worked for it, for what is pension after all, Dey asked, if not ‘a part of your working life later extended to security’, thus, it is never charity, but as something earned throughout life. Finally, we have to counterbalance this question of financial affordability with the question of moral affordability and treat them always as one and the same question: ‘Can we afford,’ Dey asked at the end of the televised debate, ‘to let our elderly die without a concern?’ You cannot vaguely agree on moral terms on this scheme but backtrack on the question of finance. We have to mobilize the political will to create the resources for this scheme. This political will will never be a given, it has to be created, painstakingly.

One of the most difficult things about old age is always the effective invisibility that comes with it: the invisibility in public space, the invisibility in state policy, the increasing invisibility even in the spaces of the family. This is the kind of invisibility which creates the climate for understanding the old only in terms of inoffensive, general truisms rather than in specific, political details because they end up occupying only the shadowy edges of our lives. As more and more farmers and artisans are turned into daily wage laborers who migrate to bigger cities for livelihood, all in accordance to our changing economic policies, India has more old people living on their own than ever before. We have a population of about ten crore elderly people, more than one sixth of which live alone or only with another elderly person, their children having migrated for work. Often, these elderly people have to continue working far into their age brackets and have to stretch their physical limits in order to have any chance of survival. If they were to stop working, many of them would starve to a lonely death, as is vouched by the fact that most number of deaths from cold-waves, homelessness and starvation in Indian cities are those of the elderly people. We have to create a climate in which the elderly can make a shattering re-entry into the terrain of visibility, into our cities, onto our pavements, into our policy documents and most importantly into our ageist imaginations. The path towards their dignity has to be laid out with this fundamental guarantee of financial independence. The Pension Parishad is only the beginning of this long overdue redressal. After all, at its root pension has the Latin etymon ofpendere, which is to weigh. What we make of this campaign will decide how India weighs its own elderly, in what esteem it holds them, whether and how much it makes them count.

Press Statement Condemning Kidnapping of Sukma Collector

admin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 05:51:15 +0000

The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan strongly condemns the kidnapping of Mr. Alex Menon, the collector of Sukma region by Maoists on 21st April 2012. Such acts of aggression are unacceptable and seriously impede the democratic processes that are vital to the functioning of the government and State. It is all the more unfortunate that Mr. Menon was kidnapped while he was attending a Gram Suraj Abhiyaan, which is a state government-run programme meant to promote interaction between local administration and citizens. We also condemn the killing of his two personal security officers during the abduction. Mr. Menon is also asthmatic, and according to his wife has only two dosages with him. We demand that he be released immediately and unconditionally.

In this context, it is important to acknowledge that the basic issues need to be addressed for any lasting solution to the accelerating violence. The Maoists have continued to release charters of demands not only during abductions, but at other times. These demands include a halt in military operations by the State, a halt to fake encounters and judicial inquiries into the killings under past encounters, stopping indiscriminate arrests of villagers, compensation for destruction of crops and killing and looting of livestock, removal of security forces from the area, punishing police personnel responsible for destruction of villages and cancelling of all MoUs with private corporations in tribal areas. Despite the fact that many of these demands require serious consideration, there has been no review, no public debate and no initiative or assurances by the State with regard to the issues raised. Some have been reiterated by civil liberties groups, particularly the implementation of the Supreme Court orders in the Salwa Judum case.

Given the context of this ongoing aggression, the government has an obligation to initiate and pursue a dialogue with all concerned parties. Avenues for dialogue will have to be found to address the cause of the conflict. Dialogue will also reaffirm the wisdom of developmental solutions over military ones, and draw clarity on what mode of development the people of that area want. It is imperative therefore that genuine attempt by the State be made to engage in dialogue to address issues and prevent unacceptable acts of aggression.

Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Bhanwar Meghwanshi and Shankar Singh

(for the MKSS collective)

22.04.12

It’s not just a job, it’s the right to work

admin — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:20:26 +0000

Reading Shibu Joseph’s article, ‘Why I am quitting my job’ was such a bizarre experience, that I had to resort to some Wikipedia text book theory to make some sense of it. One possible explanation for his piece could be “Simulated Reality”, where reality could be simulated, to a degree indistinguishable from true reality, and conscious minds may or may not be fully aware that they are inside a simulation. Trapped by city traffic, Times Now television, dire newspaper reports, and a multitude of arbitrary financial figures thrown at us, our sense of reality could possibly be simulated, be created and crafted to lead up to one having the kind of cultural view that he exhibits in his writing.

It’s meant to be a tongue-in-cheek piece of how instead of putting up with “drudgery of corporate life with its unrealistic demands of deadlines, meaningless bullet-point presentation etc”, he should become a worker in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) program. I suppose the juxtaposition is mean to be hilarious, so let’s go with it. I am not going to write on the benefits of such a program and neither am I going to write on behalf of the lakhs of people who work within this employment guarantee program, because I am not like them (doing hard physical labour) but I am like him, Mr. Joseph (yet another person writing on the internet). To borrow from the 24 x 7 news channel format, where employment guarantee and right to food bills get debated without a single potential beneficiary of these programs ever conceivably being invited to assert their views in Delhi studios, lets make this entirely theoretical. Ofcourse television has never claimed to be democratic, but some places on the internet still are, so let’s fight this out on our turf, with reference to his article.

Let’s quickly get some incorrect facts out of the way; he says that “With MGNREGA…providing me enough hard cash for my daily needs (whether I work or shirk), only an insane person will stick with the drudgery of corporate life…”. The NREGA guarantees a hundred days of work, at a wage rate notified by the Centre or the State. Once an NREGA worker has applied to the State to open up public works, and none are opened within 15 days of the application being made, the applicant is entitled to an unemployment allowance. In this structure, I can’t see where a worker gets paid to “shirk work.” On the contrary, workers are almost never paid their full wage rate. Every work opened and wage received on time, is a small battle won. Secondly, he calculates “if you are wondering what to do with those unused NREGA money, just do the maths: Rs 155 for six days a week for 52 weeks will fetch you Rs 48,360 a year.” Again, the NREGA guarantees only a hundred days of work. Further the Centre has notified the wage rate under NREGA, since 2009 to be Rs. 100, so the maths is 100 x 100 which is Rs. 10,000 for a year, if you manage to get the guaranteed hundred days of work.

He goes on to scathingly say “..a NREGA beneficiary has greatness (read wage hike) thrust on him…For the uninitiated, the govt just raised the minimum wage under NREGA to Rs 155 although no one demanded it.” I don’t know if Mr. Joesph is aware but the government is locked in a supreme court case regarding the non payment of minimum wages on NREGA works. The Government of India has not ”just raised the wage rate to Rs. 155″, but has issued a notification on 1st January 2009, freezing the NREGA minimum wage rate at Rs. 100 a day. This wage rate set by the Centre was Rs. 60 in the Act (in 2005) and revised to Rs. 80 and then Rs. 100. It is extremely unfortunate that the monetary aspects of this law (and significant others on mining royalties, pensions etc.) are not indexed. In the seven years since the enactment of the law, the inflation rate has been between 7 and 12% per year, and there is still no method or process of indexation to revise this minimum. Lest he think no one was demanding this, the Mazdoor Kissan Shakti Sangathan, is just one of the many farmers and labourer collectives who have been fighting tirelessly, for full minimum wages to be paid on government works. Variations in State wage rates (like Karnataka and Rajasthan which have a higher wage rate of Rs. 155) have been extracted after enormous pressure and struggle by peoples collectives.

“And if you thought the NREGA beneficiary moves mountains in villages to earn his keep, I would invite you to travel with me to a village, any village. The government is transforming the once industrious folks who had happily worked real hard to eke out a living into lazy squatters around some village well.” Mr. Joesph – I accept your offer of invitation, please do take me to “a village, any village” since you are assuming that the 638,365 villages (as per census 2001) in this country are all the same, and that they all once had industrious folks, who have all become lazy now. That this statement is a grossly incorrect generalisation is an understatement. After touring this “village, any village” that you will take me to, I would like to extend a counter invitation to you. I will not take you to “a village, any village” and show you that the NREGA is working perfectly and every job card holder is employed for a hundred days as guaranteed and getting paid their full wage as per the law. I will show you corruption, forged muster rolls, low wages paid and work sites appropriated by higher castes, but I will also introduce you to people, who inspite of all this, still demand to work in grueling conditions, barely managing to keep poverty at bay; because that is the value of the right to work with dignity. I will take you to Barkheda Gram Panchayat, in Bharatpur District of Rajasthan, where hundreds of villagers are demanding work under the NREGA. In a Jan Sunwai (Public Hearing) held there on 28th January of this year, people came with blank Job Cards (indicating no work opened up under the MNREGA). Over two days, 398 No. 6 (demand application) MNREGA forms were issued for just one Gram Panchayat. While this public hearing can be seen as bringing to light the serious inadequacies in implementation, and lack of awareness that this is a demand driven program, the fact that there is demand, and such overwhelming demand at that, indicates that there is a desperate need to make a program like this work. I will also take you to Pati Block in Madwani district of Madhya Pradesh, where people don’t sit around wells, but work and demand work because the NREGA has reduced migration, given a sense of identity and transformed relationships with power structures. In the meanwhile you can read more about this here and here and here) I would love to take you to Baran in Rajasthan, where Shahriya tribes have been freed from bonded labourbecause the had a chance at an alternative life, with work under the NREGA.

“.. is anyone out there foolish enough to spend on things like cycles, laptops, tablets, sarees…when politicians of all hues are falling head over heels to pamper you with such gifts?.. And all that these politicos ask is my humble vote. The next time round, I won’t choose between candidates to vote, my vote is for the guy who offers me a gadget that I don’t own now.” Jest is all very well, but why is it that we don’t ask more of our governments? Why don’t we hold them to a higher standard than getting away with giving us a gadget? Why are we selling our valuable votes so short? Instead of Mr. Joseph lamenting about his tax rate;“.. with the kind of taxes the honourable finance minister has imposed on the salaried class, I would have anyway become an aam admi by force. So why not become one by choice..?” I wish he would demand accountability from his tax, which become his government’s public funds, and is used by his country’s democratic systems. There is a strange misconception that the salaried class only pays tax (and doesn’t get any returns on it), and that the poor only benefit from this tax (and don’t work for this benefit). Tax is used for a variety of expenditures, (buying tanks, subsidising fuel, constructing the metro, controlling food prices etc.) and you might value some and seethe over others, but you have every right to keep track of it. The rural poor provide us with an incredible subsidy in terms of the food they produce and in their undervalued physical labour, so lets be cautionary before we oversimplify this equation.

Somehow we keep forgetting that people are directly, and indirectly connected to each other, to our neighbourhood businesses, our society, our banks, our politicians, our newspapers and institutes of state. I assume Mr. Joseph was really concerned about his corporate job during the economic downturn of 2008, and I hope that he realises one of the biggest reasons our country didn’t suffer seriously, was because of this massive employment guarantee program, which doesn’t gamble on money, but instead creates assets, and funnels money in a decentralised fashion across the country, to large numbers of some of the poorest people in the world.

We’re incredibly lucky to live in a democracy where the poor can demand the right to work. It’sour democracy. Seeing the enormous price people all over the world, particularly in Arab countries have paid to just ask for this, has reinforced again how extremely valuable democratic space is (even if, its a 5% shadow of the concept that exists on paper). We must protect it,use it, uphold each others rights and understand each other within it. Like Fannie Lou Hammer, the feminist and civil rights activist said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Rights denied to one person (or group of people), are rights denied to everyone. If Mr. Joseph ever gets around to quitting his job and becoming an aam aadmi and is then denied his right to work at the mandated wage rate in the NREGA, rest assured, we will fully support him to get his right of a guaranteed hundred days of work at the full wage rate.

http://thesleevesrolledupyears.blogspot.in/2012/04/its-not-job-its-right-to-live.html

Right to Information: Seeping to the capillaries

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:33:57 +0000

Aruna Roy interviewed by Kanak Mani Dixit, 01 March 2012

Kanak Dixit: We have with us Aruna Roy, from Devdungri village in Rajasthan, who has been able to take the Right to Information (RTI) from janasunuwais, or public hearings at the village level, all the way to national legislation that encompasses all of India. It is a movement that is truly global in scale.

Aruna, a question that has been troubling me is that there seems to be progress towards the death of activism. Sometimes because of the whole format of funding, rather than doing something from the heart. Sometimes there can be party affiliations. Development activities have become more a career than a calling. There seems to be an ongoing weakening of activism. How would you respond to that?

Aruna Roy: Well, I know only India very well, and I can’t speak for the rest of the countries. I think there was a lot of confusion in the early 70s when people of my generation began working for issues of poverty, hunger, fighting against injustice at various levels. We didn’t quite realise the impact of funding on one’s actions, particularly if one worked for political action. It was at that time that I really started looking at India’s history. In the growth of the national movement, actually we did have a Gandhi who refused to take office. He did opt out of traditional political structures, but kept what, for want of a better word, I like to call conscious politics, in which you define your ideology and your commitment and your principles, and you speak up for it regardless. You are in the political domain but don’t form part of a party political process. I think that strong process continues to survive in India, despite the fact that all the things you mentioned are happening. It is surviving, and there are many of us now who for the freedom and for the sheer pleasure of being able to say what one thinks is right, will not want to be in any one of these other paradigms. But of course there are other historical reasons why things might be up or down at a particular point of time, but I do think in India things are better. In fact, I would say that in today’s India there is greater clarity, especially in the last two decades, that if you take funding, then your capacities are limited. Because if you want to work within a funding system, even with integrity, then you have to get project funding, reports, you have to do accounts, and you can’t follow the logic of the people to its end. You have to follow the logic of the funding.

Tell us about how the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) fits into the paradigm of political activism that you are promoting. When we began MKSS, it was decided what not to do. There was very little to decide on what it would do. And I think there my feminist being – I can’t call it a background –and the emphasis on organic processes of participatory leadership and participatory decision-making, on the collective being more important than an individual, had a strong hold on Shankar Singh and Nikhil Dey. They are the colleagues who went with me to Devdungri, they also believed in this. When we began working, we didn’t want to define the nature of this struggle – or the movement or the campaign – without people. So the first three years we just participated in a number of campaigns with people on land, on minimum wages, things which they defined as priorities. Through these struggles the need for an organisation logically emerged. There were more than five dozen meetings held in one year where we debated on the structure, the composition, the decision-making process. And the MKSS then located itself as a political organisation, because we then defined politics not just within the political process of electioneering and parties, but outside of it as fighting within the framework of constitutional rights, and positioning ourselves with the poor, for the poor, the marginalised, the disenfranchised, the minorities, the Dalits, the women.

So what makes MKSS political? The political is in how you see an issue. The same issue can be seen in ten different ways. RTI, for instance, can be just a seminar done by academics, it can be a workshop done by people funded to spread the word, spread awareness about RTI. It can be the struggle of an individual fighting for his or her rights with the state, with a government office. It can be a poor person fighting the denial of rights, the denial of life and liberty. It can be the fight of a large collective on issues. So we would then not be party to the first couple mentioned but we would be part of the latter bit, where RTI would be seen as part of a democratic struggle, to see that there was both no arbitrary use of power and no corruption, that the system delivers as per its obligation to the people. So it becomes a political act.

Click here for interview videos and full transcript

And that requires organising. That is also what makes it political – that it is a group, acting for a goal, even if it is not through a party. Even an individual, independently working, must understand that it is not just merely settling of a corruption issue, but by asking those questions they actually ask questions of the state or the government which have larger implications.

Why did you settle on RTI as your entry point? The thing is that it has evolved. That is why I made that first statement about feminism, because a movement has to evolve from a group process and thought, it can’t just come from anywhere. Many of us felt that secrecy was terrible – we have something called the Official Secrets Act in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, wherever the British ruled. They’ve left that great gift to us, the Official Secrets Act. So every time you asked for information from the government you came up against this block. So we were all aware that that Act needed to be set aside in order for more transparency. In fact the VP Singh government had tried to enact a RTI law. So there is a history.

But what actually sharpened this was the struggle for minimum wages that MKSS was organising and fighting in rural Rajasthan. Time and again, people were told that they were liars, and the official records became terribly important both to prove their integrity, and to get a right to a livelihood, or a right to a wage, which meant food, which meant staving off hunger, which meant living a reasonable life. So at that point it became a critical issue.

But the definition of the movement actually came from many people. I’d like to refer to Sushila here. Sushila really defined it in 1996 after a forty day strike – a sit-down strike in Bijabar. We had formed the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information. We went to Delhi for a press conference, and Sushila was asked, ‘What are you doing here? You’ve only passed your fourth class, you don’t know anything about academics. It’s a big intellectual question. We’re talking about freedom of expression and Article 19 of the Indian Constitution.’ But she said to them, ‘Look, when I send my son with 10 rupees to the market place, when he comes back I ask for accounts. The government spends billions of rupees in my name. Shouldn’t I ask for my accounts?’ And she said in Hindi, ‘Hamara paisa, hamara hisab.’ So she said, ‘It’s our money, our accounts.’

So it is the simple, common-sense logic that actually defined the Right to Information movement. Then it acquired all the other various layers of the legislation, and an understanding which spread further, which spread to every aspect of governance. Today, RTI is one of the best used laws in India. But it grew from a common-sense perception of peoplehood.

If I may just add one favourite quotation of mine these days, Eduardo Galeano – one of the greatest political thinkers of South America and the world – says that nothing goes from top to bottom, except for the drilling of holes. He says that everything else, by the very meaning of the term ‘grows’, grows from the bottom up. So I think RTI has come to stay, because it is being developed and fashioned – the dos and don’ts, and the non-negotiables have been defined – by people who suffer the most from arbitrary governance.

What is the spread of RTI around the country now, and what are the challenges being faced? Because I would expect it’s not enough to have legislation, you’ve got to watchdog it, to make sure that it does what it is meant to do. Actually I was quite amazed that it has spread to all sorts of sectors. It is being used by the people who are the most oppressed. I would not say it has spread all over India. There is a sufficient number of groups all over India who use it, but the groups I’m talking about are the people who are most oppressed. So it’s the Dalits who use it in cases of atrocities against them, you have the poor using it to access food and shelter, you have minorities using it for access to their rights, as in Gujarat, where people who were victims of the genocide have recently used RTI. Recently I have been in Manipur, and even though there is an Armed Forces Special Powers Act which restricts everything, the women who are ‘gun widows’ use RTI for accessing their minimum needs. Nobody knows us, no one knows the MKSS, no one knows Aruna Roy or Nikhil Dey or Shankar Singh. But the joy that I get is in seeing RTI being used more logically by the poor.

But there are some untoward and sad incidents. We’ve lost about 15 activists who have been killed in the process of accessing information. They had access to sensitive information. There are many of them, single people – in the sense that they are not working in groups – and therefore they have been identified and killed. Now we are fighting for some kind of protection for those activists, either through an extension of the Whistle-Blowers Act, or some kind of protection that will cover their issues. But it is a huge problem. This also proves that using RTI is a political act, since no innocent act of just asking for information would lead to this.

I would just like to add one little incident which has come to my mind. You know the Bombay terror attack, and we lost three important policemen. One of the widows of those very eminent policemen – who was given a martyr’s funeral – she couldn’t access the post-mortem report from the police station, even with her husband being a policeman, except through RTI.

Would you say that the RTI Act has the possibility of seeping to the capillaries so that it covers accountability at the national level, but also accountability at the village level? I like that phrase. Yes it has seeped to the capillaries. My nephew went trekking in the Himalayas, and went to Lahaul and Spiti, and saw that there was a community of villages which had one person who was an RTI facilitator, who helped them write applications. So RTI has already reached those places.

So soon enough you may not even know all that is happening in this area? I simply do not know, and I have not known for the last four years, where all it has spread. Though, there are huge issues. One is that the mandated information commissions are not looking after their responsibilities. The government has not implemented Section 4 of the Act, which requires it to proactively display information. It hasn’t fulfilled its obligations at the central government or the state government level. Almost every single government office has not done it. Just a few have. The websites are not in place except for some, like the Ministry of Rural Development, which has done it. But there are others who haven’t. There are public information officers, who are very adamant and don’t provide the information, and have harassed people.

Are there some states that are better than others? Well, I think there are different sets of problems in every single state. I don’t think there is any one state that has done phenomenally. Except if we look at NREGA’s (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) work, where there is a part of it which is related to the Right to Information, which requires displaying information and auditing it publicly. That I think the state of Andhra Pradesh has done very well. But if you look at public display of information they are poor, if you look at RTI they are very poor, there are commissioners who have been appointed without transparency so there is an agitation in Hyderabad, so it’s a mixed bag.

Is this not something that will require constant watch-dogging? See, I think every single thing, including democracy, actually needs constant watchdogging. I think the power of the vote is not just to cast it once in five years as we do in India. I think the power of the vote also gives you an obligation along with the power, and that is to monitor the way my government runs for me. What RTI does is facilitate that obligation. And actually when the RTI Act was passed, I thought, ‘Aaah, now I can relax.’ But after that, work has quadrupled, because in the use of the act there are more problems than in the making of it.

Once you have started on this path of political activism from the bottom up to change the face of Indian society, there are these other areas that you’ve also now got engaged in. One of them is the right to work, one of them is right to employment, one of them is the right against corruption. Do you find yourself now engaging in other areas because it is the next step after RTI? Actually RTI by itself is nothing. RTI must be applied to a set of activities, within a certain panorama, within a certain sector. And you know the English said the devil lies in the details, and so it does. Every single question of the RTI Act unravels another huge set of challenges. So it requires a particular kind of tenacity and purpose, and a detailed understanding of how things function. That is when you know where the nerve centre lies, and then RTI becomes an absolutely invaluable tool.

RTI is actually a seminal tool for democracy, and what it does is help in the sharing of power. And it shares power in a manner in which it doesn’t matter where you are located and whom you are talking to. Because this power is rightfully that of the sovereign, the people of the country, which is vested in a system to govern, whether it is politics or bureaucracy. Then it is understood that you are actually only a caretaker of what is the power of the people. And I also don’t agree that people can run in anarchy. You need a government, you need a political party which will state its ideology and work according to this ideology, but that also needs to be monitored. Even parties which have a very good ideology can go astray. And the bureaucracy, of course, can be spineless and go whichever way it is pushed in order to maintain the status quo.

So in that sense RTI could help stabilise democracy and make it real. We talk about elections not being all that democracy is, so what is missing seems to be this element. Yes, it is a very important way of looking at a revolution, bringing in equality, which our constitution has given us on paper since 1951, so to get that equality in place, and to also fight against the symptoms of mal-administration and governance. That is why in India now, interest in governance has become a revolutionary thing. Actually it would have been dismissed 30 or 40 years ago as rubbish. It was more about telling those interested in governance that [they] should look at changing the political party. But we found in India that you keep changing your political parties, and their stated agendas are very different, but in actual fact nothing really changes. So how do you make the real changes happen? That is where RTI has really located itself – in democracy. It derives from constitutional right and therefore it is constitutional. It looks at parliamentary systems, it looks at the role of the Parliament. The law was enacted in Parliament, it was dialogued with political parties, so the political parties looked at their agendas and their manifestos. It brought in the notion of accountability, because if you make a promise you must keep to it. Then it is our obligation – the activists obligation, the people’s obligation – to make sure that accountability exists. So RTI brings in the plurality of democratic structures, and of no one group or one entity being paramount in it.

What about accountability in India at the national level? Can RTI reach those rarefied elevations as well, to demand accountability when multi-billion dollar scams occur? Actually it has. You see, RTI is not a political movement. The RTI is a tool. So what does it do? It unearths information which would otherwise not be accessible up front. Many of the battles that have been fought have been fought because of RTI applications made to access that information. Then you have to fight a political battle. See, in the political battles, I think the poor fight longer and in a more sustained manner than anybody else. So the battles of the poor have been sustained over years.

Whereas the battles of the big scams have to be fought by the middle class and the upper class elite. Because it is a battle in which the idiom is so different today, because payoffs are not in sacks of money that are unearthed from under the floor, but they are in deals, and so on and so forth. That awareness has also come now, and that is why we argue that you need a different structural system to fight big-level corruption than to fight poor people’s corruption. Hence the understanding that a plurality of groups need to align themselves to fight corruption. You can’t have one group fighting all systems.

If it is the middle class and the professional classes who also have to be alert, is that what the Lokpal Bill is all about? Actually, the campaign began with the definition of an angst which preoccupied India for years. Ever since I was young corruption has been a topic, always talked about at home, and at the dukaan. The Lokpal Bill as present actually would lead to an extraordinarily empowered bureaucratic system – another vertical structure and another policeman, in very simple terms. The system put in place by the Bill would inevitably become corrupt, from our point of view, because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So if you create a bureaucracy which oversees all wings of government – the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive – then within that institution, who polices the policeman? It is a big issue.

But the Lokpal Bill was supposed to police the policeman. But then it becomes another policeman. So who polices that policeman? Accountability has to be there at all levels. So for our part, we offered a formulation which is now being broadly accepted by many people.

Tell us about that. In that formulation, we’ve broken it up into its logical components – not too big – so that each can oversee the other and there is some amount of accountability. So one would be the high-level corruption; that was the bill that went into a morass in the Rajya Sabha, with nothing resolved. Then there is the Grievance Requests Bill, which is now with a standing committee of Parliament. Then you have the judicial accountability, you have judges like Justice Verma who argue that the judiciary must be independent, and if you take away its independence then you take away one of the most important over-seeing mechanisms in a democracy. So now you have the judiciary with its own standards of oversight. But most important of these are the grievance requests at the grassroots, which have now become the most important aspect that will concern millions of Indians.

Please tell us more about the grievance request activism. Well, let me just tell you a story. I think stories can be the most telling. This was about 6 weeks ago, maybe 8 weeks ago, in a small town called Bhil in Rajasthan. We had a public hearing and a grievance request meeting on electricity with people who had grievances with the Electricity Department. We invited the collector, who is the biggest administrator. With him came all the officials, and we had people come and say what was wrong with their electricity systems. This need not be corruption, may be corruption. And what happened? You have a meter, which is not connected to anything, but it is still telling you that you have to pay money. You don’t have a bulb. You’re supposed to be given a free CFL bulb, but there is no CFL bulb. There is nothing, but you’re still being billed. And then when you want the electricity, you are being told that the pole can’t come to your village home because it requires a special amount of wires to be put in. You’re a Dalit, you enjoy certain benefits, those benefits have not been given to you. So over 500 people came to that meeting. Amazing results, because all of this had already been sanctioned on paper. Within the next month, there were 4000 homes where people were provided CFL bulbs. Otherwise they would have been pocketed, and that was 40 lakhs worth of CFL bulbs, in Indian rupees. The point is the complainants didn’t want a criminal case against the Electricity Department. The people with grievances just want a light to burn that day, to cook, to read, for the children to study for their exams.

Grievances are such things. So it could be a hospital, it could be electricity, it could be a ration card, where I don’t have a ration card and I need food tomorrow. I am not interested in the criminality of it, but I the service, I want my ration card. So it involves a separate set of things. If there is a criminal action, that can be taken up with the police station or with the Lokpal, whichever category it comes under. But for the grievance, it must be addressed immediately.

So rather than bring a criminal case, I just seek the service. But where is the sanctioning power behind this bill? We have looked at an entire system that will be created, which will not be a new bureaucracy. Look at the RTI Bill. It has not created another bureaucracy. What we have done is empowered certain people within the system to act as information officers. There will be grievance request officers, who will be given a time limit, and within the time limit they must settle the issue that is brought up by the citizen. If they don’t, like in RTI there will be a penalty levied on them, and the penalty is the trigger that makes people work. Then there will be an appellate system, and there will be an appellate authority at the district level to deal with it, but it will be time bound. If it’s not time bound, then it’s pretty useless.

So there is now the possibility of a Greivances Addressed Act coming from a Grievances Addressed Bill, which you are helping to fine-tune and polish. And that is a national-level act? Yes, it will be a national-level act, and the debate is on as to whether under the Indian federal structure it can be applied to all the states. We are arguing that if the RTI Act could be an act that applied to the whole county, why not grievance requests. Now it is under debate, let us see where it leads.

So from Rajasthan and Devdungri, from RTI and its country-wide application, you’ve now moved on to grievances. Where else do you think you will be led to? I think the MKSS has a lot of things to do. Personally, I think I should look at what I can do as a retired Indian.

But how does one retire when one is an activist? I think one takes on different jobs.

I want to end with a personal question. How would Mohandas Karmachand Gandhi have taken to MKSS, in your personal estimation? I think Gandhiji would have approved of some of our things, and been a little sceptical, maybe, of some of the things we do. I have lived with Gandhiji in my mind since I was born. For me he has never been away from my psyche. But I have also thought about some of these things. So I suppose he would have absolutely approved of the way we live, he would have approved of the way we struggle, he would have approved of our primary identity with the very poor, he would even have approved of the biases that we have in our politics, but he may have had questions about how much you can trust the government with leading the right way. But somewhere there I think one has to come to an uneasy compromise even with one’s instincts, because much as we may dislike governments, governments are necessary to govern countries. We believe in nation states. And political parties are necessary for parliamentary democracy. And for people, poor people, parliamentary democracy is vitally important. We may have had a few quarrels with Gandhiji on that, but still I think we would have largely got on.

And I think Gandhiji may have approved of the fact that MKSS functions, even till today, out of a small hut in Devdungri—

And with no institutional funds.

And with no institutional funds, he would have liked that too.

(As interviewed for Himal South Asian and Himal Khabar Patrika)

Annual Narrative of MKSS Events 2011

admin — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:33:44 +0000

The MKSS organizes jan sunwais (public hearings), samvaads (discussions) and expresses solidarity with several other workers’ rights and human rights networks across the country. In 2011, the MKSS intervened in the cases of bonded labourers in Baran, expressed solidarity for a variety of anti-mining movements, organized jan sunwais in various parts of Rajasthan including Baran, Rajsamand and Bharatpur and intervened in a Supreme Court case regarding non-payment of minimum wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA). This year, significantly, MKSS participated in the anti-corruption and grievance redress mechanisms to be instituted in the country, and put forward its own formulation of a decentralized grievance redress mechanism that people can use to effectively combat the non-delivery of essential services by the State.

January 2011

The MKSS organized and participated in a samvaad related to the MNREGA on the 7^th of January which is a regular activity in the MKSS calendar. A Samvaad is a formal platform where people can take their grievances related to the implementation of the MNREGA (delayed payment, non-sanctioning of work, non-payment of minimum wages, non-issuance of receipts, etc.) to the officials in charge in that area. The MKSS meets in the days before the samvaad and prepares for the same. This includes the setting of an agenda, decisions on which officials to invite, identifying cases to be presented, gathering information on anomalies in government spending, details on siphoning of funds, etc. Apart from this, the MKSS participated in a Kisan Yatra in Hyderabad on the 19th and a MGNREGA padyatra ending in Vijaywada in Karnataka on the 28^th. It also took part in a rally in support of Dr. Binayak Sen in Jaipur on the 30^th.

February

On 2^nd February, MKSS and the Suchna evum Rozgar ka Adkhikar Abhiyan organized a Mazdoor Mela on the fifth anniversary of the enactment of the MNREGA. Hundreds of villagers from all over Rajasthan gathered in Jaipur to discuss the successes and failures of the Act. Bonded labourers from Baran also attended and presented their story to the other participants. MKSS co-organised and participated in the 3rd national RTI convention in Shillong organized by the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) which urged the government to properly implement proactive disclosures under Section 4 of the RTI Act. It also demanded an anti-corruption commission or body, like the Lokpal/Lokayukta, which can ensure that information accessed through the RTI Act that exposes corruption is acted upon and the guilty are held accountable. It organized a public meeting on the issue of bonded labourers in Baran on the 22^nd in support of Mamta Bai and Gyarsi Bai of Jagrut Mahila Sangathan. In this meeting, Mohan Gopal (Director,JudicialAcademy, Bhopal) was also present and issues related to the implementation of the Bonded Labour Abolition Act were discussed.

March

In March, the MKSS was part of awareness campaigns initiated in Karnataka on the need to unionize MNREGA workers. This was a learning experience for the MKSS members, to understand the processes and benefits of unionizing workers. This was an important first step in potentially unionizing MNREGA workers in Rajasthan as well.

April

The MKSS strongly believes in the validity and functioning of state systems. The poor need a government to function, to deliver services, and to give them the basic goods and services to stay alive. As part of this philosophy, the MKSS is invited to annually conduct a module as part of mid-career training sessions of Indian Administrative Service officers and administrative officers from other countries as well. They are trained on transparency and accountability issues in bureaucratic procedures.

May

The MKSS was conceived on Labour Day, 1990, and celebrates its birthday on the 1^stof May every year. These celebrations are held in neighboring Bhim. There was another NREGA samvaad on 9^th May. This format of the samvaad, as described earlier, is where labourers and activists interact with government officials and there is on-the-spot grievance redress. This samvaad set a precedent, as National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) used this like a model, to initiate smavaads in the education sector. Similarly, samvaads were held in other sectors as well like health, education, mining etc.

June

On 12^th June the MKSS central committee had a meeting in Devdungri. This is an internal meeting to work out processes, procedures and clarify decisions taken with all members. Democratic mechanisms are followed and collective decisions are taken on which awards to accept, which invitations to accept, which forums are acceptable to speak from, which donations from certain individuals should be accepted, etc.

July

On 23^rd July the MKSS met to work on the MNREGA, and organized another samvaad on the same.

August

The MKSS went to Orissa to express solidarity with the anti-POSCO agitations. This was a pivotal strike in the anti-mining and anti-big corporate resistance in the mining belt ofIndia. It also held a public meeting on the issues related to the Kalbelia tribe. This is a tribe that has been de-notified and is not on the Below Poverty Line (BPL) list. State schemes and interventions do not reach them. The women are particularly exploited. These issues were discussed and were raised in Jaipur later in the month as well. The MKSS also went toBangalorefor the Azim Premji Public Lecture where it presented its grievance redress and alternative Lokpal formulations.

September

The MKSS was part of the many discussions that the NCPRI had on anti-corruption measures. This became a huge political and media issue and it was important to be part of these discussions as part of civil society. MKSS was also represented at the Standing Committee meeting on the Lokpal. On the 27th of September, the MKSS met in Devdungri to regroup on activities and to plan the months ahead.

October

On the 10^th and 11^th of October, the MKSS participated in and co-organised a Whistleblower Protection Convention organized by the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information in Delhi. This was to brainstorm and participate in the discussions on the provisions of the Grievance Redress and Whistleblower Protection laws that were being debated in the country.

November

On 3rd November, the MKSS organized a jan sunwai (public hearing) on a specific issue – electricity—in Bhim. The public hearing particularly focused on two pertinent issues. It highlighted the nature of implementation of the Central Government’s Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana, (RGGVY) its flagship programme to provide free electricity connections to BPL households. Secondly, the public hearing highlighted the urgent need for a focused legislation on grievances faced by citizens over a range of schemes and programmes, and their structural redress. It was a huge success: cases of corruption came in and person after person testified to a variety of problems – getting a bill without electricity, getting electricity without a bill, not receiving light bulbs they were entitled to, etc.

December

A follow up to the earlier jan sunwai was held on 7th December, outside the Tehsil office in Bhim. Hundreds of people returned, eager to have their complaints heard and registered. The effectiveness of this platform was validated to all concerned – the public, the officials and the MKSS. The public and participatory nature of such an event allows for a sense of collectivity, empowering people and forcing accountability on officials.

Parallel to the electricity jan sunwai, MKSS members were involved in raising awareness and holding camps on an insurance scheme for unregistered workers.

January 2012

MKSS went outside the district it is based in, Rajsamand, to one chosen at random – Bharatpur. This was to see the situation elsewhere and to understand the service delivery systems of schemes and the implementation of the NREGA. It organised a shivir (camp) on the 28^th of January, along with a local organization, Prayatna, between the people of two villages (Jhambri and Barkhaeda) and the government officials of that district. The response was overwhelming, as over five hundred people came and massive discrepancies in the delivery of provisions under the scheme came forth. The collector of the district ordered immediate action and relief for the same. The MKSS also participated in a shivir in its own district of operations, Rajsamand, on the 31^st of January, which was organized by the government. Officials of every department were present and had set up desks and camps to file complaints.

Pension Parishad, 25th February, Pune

admin — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:33:26 +0000

Pension Parishad, Lets Walk Together, Pune, 25^th February 2012

89, New Timber Market, Bhavni Peth, Pune 411002

Phone: 020-2647307

11/02/2010

Dear friends,

This is to invite you for a very important meeting and seek your solidarity on a very important issue. For years, there has been no social security for people in the unorgainsed sector. The ageing working poor are the most vulnerable because they are neither able to work nor do they have any means of sustenance.

The existing legislation on this, ‘Social Security for the unorganized sector 2008’ does only lip service on paper. There are no provisions with regard to a Central fund, no financial commitment and absolutely nothing binding on the government. The Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme, provides a monthly pension of Rs.500 to persons over 60 years, but only below the poverty line.

In actual fact, all the working poor who are working in insecure work and are not covered under any legislation should automatically be covered under the Unorganized Workers Social Security Act. Those who can work under the NREGA do so, but this is demanding, physical labour and can not be the only option for a person who is over sixty. Further, with the emergence of nuclear families, the elderly are particularly defenseless. It is time that they are allowed to live with dignity.

We invite you to a public meeting to demand a non-targeted, non discriminatory universal old age pension for all workers above 60, all who are not covered by labour legislation. We hope to make this a national campaign, and we will start on 26th February 2012, at 2 p.m. at Shivaji Market Yard in Pune, Maharasthra. Workers from all over the country will be in attendance. We hope that you and your organisation will be present. We would also like to have a meeting of the organising groups, to discuss the best way to take this forward as a national campaign.

Please do contact Poornima Chikarmane (email id: pchikarmane1@gmail.com) to confirm your presence and the numbers coming from your organisation (and copy us in the email) so that they can make arrangements for your stay.

Warm Regards and In Solidarity,

Baba Adav Aruna Roy

Bharatpur experiences its first Jan Sunwai and Shikayat Nivaran Camp in Barkhaeda panchayat: administration reacts, impact spreads across district; key policy makers from ministries witness proceedings.

admin — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:32:09 +0000

On the 28^th of January, 2012, people of Barkheda and Jhamdi gram panchayat came in record numbers for the ‘Jan Nigrani evam Shikayat Nivaraan Shivir’ organized by Soochna and Rozgaar Abhayan and Prayatna Sanstha, Bharatpur. Also present were key financial advisors and policy makers from different ministries, as part of a policy and service delivery workshop organized by the Institute of Economic Growth. The social audit and grievance camp focused on four schemes – Janani Suraksha Yojna, the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojna, the Indira Aawas Yojna and the MGNREGA.

Under the Janani Suraksha Yojna, shocking cases of discrepancy came forth; out of the 256 women who were listed in government health department records as having been given Rs 1900 maternity benefit, over fifty women came forth to say that they had not received any such sum. Records showed the issuance on a cheque on the 22^nd of a month, while a woman testified that her delivery took place only on the 29^th of the same month and did not receive this benefit.

While the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojna guarantees BPL households a free electricity connection and CFL bulb, several people came with CFL bulbs that had been distributed to them just the night before despite not having had mandated electricity connections for years. Raising laughter from the crowd and officials, a man brought an electricity meter in his hands. Inspite of having an unconnected meter and no electricity, he had been receiving a regular bill from the electricity department.

In a resounding discrediting of the SDM’s statement that the low spending on MNREGA in Bharatpur District (15 lakhs out of the 1 crore budget) is due to lack of demand, over 400 people registered for work under the MNREGA. When Nikhil Dey, member of both State and Central Employment Guarantee Council, asked the gathering how many of them wanted work under the MNREGA, a forest of hands went up.

A combination of a public hearing and a grievance camp provided an opportunity for people to express their grievances, to be heard by government officials and to get redress. Mr. Gaurav Goyal, District Collector Bharatpur announced immediate action. He promised that the SDM, BDO, AEN and other officials present would resolve the highlighted issues within two weeks. The following day, he issued notices to several officials and ordered a continuation of the camp, on a Sunday, to file grievances and issue dated receipts. The impact of this hearing and camp held in just one panchayat was felt across the district.

Press Statement Condemning Attack on NREGA Whistleblower

admin — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:31:24 +0000

We are deeply shocked at the attack on Dhura Ram, an NREGA-RTI whistleblower on 2^nd February 2012. Dhura Ram through his complaint brought to light a Rs. 4 crores scam in MGREGA works in Nokha Block, Bikaner District, Rajasthan. Today, after this violent attack, Dhura Ram is admitted in the emergency ward of P.B.M hospital, with multiple fractures and head injuries. Today’s incident once again illustrates the unabated trend of violent attacks on anybody who tries to raise voice against big corruption in MGNREGA. Such violence as a strategy employed by vested interests to silence demands for accountability is completely unacceptable and we call upon the state to not only take action in such cases of corruption, but also to immediately ensure protection to the whistleblowers.

Dhura Ram is a tireless crusader against corruption in the MGNREGA. He filed an RTI application demanding information regarding the implementation of the MNREGA scheme in his district. He did not receive this information on time, and filed an appeal number 2147/2010 with the State Commission. In spite of the commissioner ordering this information to be provided, he did not receive the same. As a result, he filed a case with the Information Commission on 16-09-2011 and demanded that details of money spent on MNREGA works be disclosed. Finally, he obtained information from the MNREGA website and went on to verify the same. The said information revealed a serious fraud in the NREGA work of removing sand from the roads. In a single block, 4 crores have been spent on this work which is alleged to be fraudulent in nature.

Dhura Ram on the basis of his investigation, filed a complaint on 16-01-2012 with the Anti-Corruption Bureau in Jaipur and the MNREGA Commissioner in the Secretariat (Jaipur). The investigation by the Chief Minister’s office took place in January in which huge amounts of corruption came to be noticed. The exercise is still underway. As a result, Dhura Ram has been continually harassed and threatened and today he was violently attacked. In addition to Dhura Ram, state government engineer, Mr Mirza Rahman was also intimidated and attacked.

As part of celebrating February 2^nd as MGNREGA day, Sonia Gandhi in her speech today strongly stated that “We cannot ignore the complaints regarding irregularities and corruption in the scheme.” We sincerely hope that the government will put these solemn words into practice. We demand that serious action be taken against the concerned officials and the intimidators be prosecuted.

Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey

Villagers in Bharatpur, Rajasthan express the urgency of a grievance redress mechanism

admin — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:17:15 +0000

A common held middle-class view is that villagers tend towards lethargy and complacency, and are not driven by an impetus for change. However, this myth far from corresponds to reality, which reveals that, when provided a conductive platform, villagers can be highly outspoken and articulate about their grievances and demands. A recent public hearing and grievance redress camp held in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, brought to light just how many grievances an average villager is faced with and how ardent they are to make these heard. This jan sunwai and shikayat nivaran camp in the Gram Panchayat of Barkheda unprecedentedly gave villagers the opportunity to publicly speak out their personal and collective grievances before the concerned government administrators. What is more, a simple and ad hoc grievance application mechanism had been set up, allowing each villager to register their complaints and to demand work under NREGA. In a manifested proactive and spirited manner, over the course of the day hundreds of complaints were written and swarms of people rushed to the mike to testify the non-deliverance of government schemes.

This latest public hearing and grievance redress camp was organised by Suchna evum Rozgar ka Akhikar Abhiyan, in collaboration with Prayatna Sansthan, a local organisation. Prior to the public hearing, an audit team comprised of the two organisations had spent three days carrying out surveys and door-to-door verifications in Barkheda Gram Panchayat. The main schemes audited by the team were the Janani Suraksha Yojna, the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojna, and the MGNREGA. The state of all these schemes quickly proved to be appalling.

On the day of the public hearing itself, a colourful tent is put up on the school grounds. Desks corresponding to each of the departments have been set up, with volunteers facilitating the registration of complaints. One separate desk has been set up for application for NREGA works. As people begin trickling in they crowd around these tables, each villager anxious to have their complaint noted or their demand for work registered. No one wants to miss this unique opportunity to have their accumulated grievances registered. The commotion around the desks only subsides, when the crowd is convinced that the registering of complaints will be resumed later on and on the following day.

Representatives from all of the departments being scrutinised are present. From the electricity department, the Junior Engineer, the Assistant Engineer, and the Executive Engineer have all shown up. Two CMHOs have come from the health department. Also present are the BDO, the SDM and the Tehsildar of Barkheda. Towards the end of the public hearing, the District Collector also makes his appearance.

Prominent financial advisors and policy makers from key ministries, including the Ministry of Rural Development and Ministry of Panchayati Raj, observe the proceedings, assuming the role of ‘jury’. They have been invited to attend the public hearing as part of a policy and service delivery workshop organized by theInstituteofEconomic Growth.

The first scheme to be scrutinised is the Janani Suraksha Yojna. Under this scheme, a mother is given Rs 1400 per delivery of a child in a government hospital, as well as Rs 300 to cover the travel costs and free medication. Throughout the public hearing, names of women from the official list of beneficiaries under this scheme are called up so as to cross-examine whether the recorded information is correct. The first woman to speak up is an old woman who is asked whether her daughter had received Rs 1400 for the delivery of her child, as stated on record. The old woman explains that her daughter has been a migrant labourer in Gujaratfor the last few years and that both of her children were born there, and had thus received no money from the local health department authorities. The next woman whose name appears on the official list as having received Rs 1400 for the delivery of her child, announces on the mike that her child was born at home, and was thus not entitled to the government scheme. More than 30 women are now on the stage, each one wanting to announce their story. One woman says that her child was born en route to the hospital, so she was not given any money. Another one recounts that she had given birth in a private hospital. One woman’s name appears on the record three times as having received money for all three of her children’s delivery, yet she states that she received Rs 1400 only for the birth of one of her children, as the other two were born at home and in a private hospital. Yet another woman announces that her child was born on the 29^th of a given month, yet on record a cheque had been issued to her on the 22^nd of that same month.

Various women come to the stage who had received their entitled Rs 1400, yet each one of them recounts that they had been made to pay a ‘cut’ to nurses and doctors. When asked whether they were given reasons for this payment, they respond that they were told that it was for ‘chai’ or ‘mitai’. One woman was made to pay on so many instances (for the cleaning of her baby, for medication, for the doctor and the nurse, for the taxi fare) so that at the end, she was left with nothing of the Rs 1400 that she had been given. Following each of the accounts, there is an uproar of laughter from the crowd. They are all evidently entertained by the unscrupulous, yet all too familiar, extent of these cases of fraud.

The next department to be examined is the electricity department. The representative from the electricity department is requested to inform the villagers on their entitlements under the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojna, which provides free electricity connections to BPL families. Under this scheme, BPL households receive all the components required to set up an electricity connection, as well as a CFL bulb, which consumes less electricity. The first man to come to the mike is asked whether he received a CFL bulb, to which he responds that he was given a bulb by the electricity company just the night before. The audience bursts out laughing once again. The audacity of this gesture is apparent to all. The calculation is made that if each CFL bulb costs Rs 100, and there are 83000 households in this block, the non-deliverance of bulbs alone amounts to a fraud of 83 lakhs rupees! Another man comes forward with his entire meter under his arm. He says his electricity has not been working for over three years, and yet he continues to be billed. Many such stories repeat, with people complaining that they still have no electricity, or that they were made to pay for their electricity components, or that they had not received CFL bulbs, with some exceptions who received a bulb on the previous day.

Lastly NREGA is scrutinised. The Gram Panchayat secretary reads out the amount that Barkheda has spent on NREGA over the last years, which amounts to a mere 15 lakh in total. When asked why so little had been spent when a Gram Panchayat can claim up to crores of rupees under NREGA, the response given is that people are not demanding work. When the audience is asked to raise their hands if they would work if NREGA were to be resumed, all the hands of the approximately 500 villagers present enthusiastically and vehemently go up. All of them say that they are in dire need of work, but that since years work has not been provided to them under NREGA. The villagers are informed on the significance of ‘Form 6’, which gives an applicant of work under NREGA a receipt as proof of when the work was sought. If work is not provided within 15 days of application, the person is entitled to unemployment benefit.

To conclude the public hearing proceeding, the District Collector engages in an interactive and animated session with the villagers and the audit team. In response to the individual and collective complaints, the Collector makes a range of promises, all of which he ends up keeping. Amongst other, two of the village midwives under the Janani Suraksha Yojna are suspended; the CMHO is ordered to provide a report of the Janani Suraksha Yojna from the entire district of Bharatpur within seven days; CC notices are issued to the BDO and the superintendent of the electricity department; the SDM is ordered to carry out public hearings of this sort in each of the Tehsils of Bharatpur.

Altogether, this event proved to have a highly bestirring and animating effect on people. It became evident that villagers know all too well that they are being deprived of their rights and entitlements, yet they have no opportunity to make themselves heard. In the current state of affairs that does not favour the poor and marginalised, an awareness of rights alone does not translate into redress and accountability. This public hearing and grievance redress camp allowed the aggrieved direct confrontation with those who deprive them of their entitlement. It facilitated a platform from which people’s sense of injustice and their demands for redress could not only be heard, but also addressed and ultimately acted upon.

The positive experience of the recent public hearing in Bharatpur signalled an important message for the entire country: in order for the innumerable grievances that a common person is faced with to be heard and addressed, a grievance redress mechanism must be institutionalised. Without such a mechanism in place, people will continuously be subjected to the apathy of government functionaries. A platform from which people can publicly and collectively raise their concerns, as well as a system that facilitates the registering of complaints, as was the case in Bharatpur, ought to be seriously deliberated at the policy level.

by Gaia Von Hatzfeldt

Grievance Redress Manch

admin — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:59:43 +0000

4^th December 2011
by Gaia Von Hatzfeldt

The villagers gathered under the colourful tent in front of the Tehsil office in Bhim yesterday, were witness to an unforeseen, yet potentially very significant event: an impromptu experiment with a Grievance Redress Manch. What had been planned as a ‘jan sunwai’, by the spontaneous turn of events morphed into a platform in which mass grievances were raised and addressed. The presence of the concerned government administration as well as ‘civil society’ actors ensured a conductive environment for people’s individual grievances to be attended to. The success of this experience could prove to be an important ingredient in the broader attempts to strengthen grievance redress mechanisms.

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Jan sunwais, as pioneered by Mazdoor Kishan Shakti Sangathan in the early 1990’s, originally focused on development works at the Gram Panchayat level. Of late, MKSS has ventured into carrying out jan sunwais on an entire department. The first such jan sunwai was held on 3^rd November of this year, wherein the electricity department of Bhim, Rajsamand was audited. The particular focus was on the ‘Rajiv Gandhi Gram Vidyutikaran Yojna’ – a scheme to provide free electricity connections to BPL households.

Armed with the list of BPL families who have been provided electricity connections – as per the official electricity department records – a survey team conducted door-to-door verifications in various Gram Panchayats within the Block of Bhim. These findings were then presented publicly in a jan sunwai held in Bhim. Multiple cases of corruption and grievances were uncovered, ranging from bribe-taking for installing connections, to the non-deliverance of connection components, to the mishandling of electricity bills. During the jan sunwai proceeding, people’s complaints were registered and handed over to the electricity department. It was agreed that the departmental administration would look into these complaints and publicly announce its progress in a follow-up jan sunwai to be held the following month.

While the electricity department was diligently attempting to deal with every case that had been registered during the jan sunwai, another survey team set off to conduct further door-to-door verifications. Similar to the previous round of surveys, manifold stories of corruption came to the surface. People were urged to attend the second jan sunwai that would serve as a follow-up of the previous jan sunwai, as well as to allow people to register new complaints.

As scheduled, the follow-up jan sunwai was held one month after the initial jan sunwai. At first, as the day began, only few people turned up. MKSS members sat down on the floor and around the tables that had been set up to seat the expected panel of district administration, recording the grievances of the few people that had already arrived. Gradually more and more people began trickling-in, shoving their way towards anybody willing to record their grievance. By the time the electricity department administration and the related contractors arrived, there were such swarms of people, that they too were compelled to write down the many complaints that came flowing in. Over a span of a few hours, hundreds of people rushed forward, eager to have their complaint heard and registered.

It was astounding to observe with what conviction and fervour people presented their grievances. An elderly woman battled her way through the crowd on her crutches, infuriated by a mammoth electricity bill she had recently received. She had not received a bill in over three years, and when she finally did, it is over Rs 6000. Being widowed and having no children, she bemoaned that it is entirely inconceivable for her to pay such a bill. In another incidence, a group of people openly declared that they were forced to pay a bribe of Rs 700 each to the sub-contractor, blaming the contractors present in the event for being implicated in the bribe-taking. Another woman lamented that she had received the free electricity components, but had been told that she had to cover the costs for erecting an electricity pole herself. As she could not afford this, she had tied the electricity cables to a tree. Now the tree has fallen, and with it, her electricity connection has been cut. One man recounted that since over two years he had been receiving two bills, but that when he goes to the electricity department to complain, his problem is not addressed and he continues to be sent two bills. Countless such cases were brought forward, each revealing the severity of consequences that the inefficiency and corruption of the electricity department has on the villagers it is supposed to be benefitting.

This platform, in which administration and staff was exclusively focused on hearing and registering people’s grievances, turned out to be a critical juncture in the relationship between citizens and government administration. Had the widowed woman who received the delayed bill gone to the electricity department directly, in most likelihood she would have been shoved around, with no one catering to her demand. In fact, there were countless accounts of people who had gone with their particular grievance to the electricity department, yet, often, after the third or even fourth visit, their complaint had still not been registered. An individual seeking to be heard in the cold corridors of officialdom is typically greeted with apathy and contempt. However, in a setting set up exclusively for the redress of grievances, with each complaint heeded and legitimized, people gain confidence. Moreover, the public and participatory nature of such an event, allows for a sense of collectivity, furthermore empowering people. It was this that allowed villagers to directly accuse the contractor for seeking Rs 700 as bribe from them. It takes immense courage to speak up to those in power, when one is accustomed to being treated with disdain. The Grievance Redress Manch facilitated precisely such a platform.

The experiment with holding a public and collective ‘camp’ for registering grievances as experienced in Bhim proved to be such a success, that it is paramount for this experiment to be taken forward. The current deliberations of setting up a Grievance Redress mechanism only makes true sense, if people are guided in the process and a conducive environment is facilitated. Without such an environment, common citizens will not be guaranteed from falling prey to official apathy. The experience in Bhim showed that provided the platform, people proactively seek redress. There must be independent People Support Centres at the block level, providing information and facilitation to common people. In addition, regular Grievance Redress camps ought to be seriously deliberated, in order to spread the success of the recent Bhim Grievance Redress Manch.