Rural employment scheme has raised cost of labour 10-fold in rural India

Express News Service
Chennai:
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme may have managed to curb migrations but it has created new contradictions by increasing the cost of labour 10-fold in rural India which only the government or a corporate industry can actually provide, according to an expert.

Delivering a talk on ‘Politics of Mediated Democracy: The Draft national Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill 2011’, Uma Maheshwari, a postdoctoral Fellow at IIT-Madras and an independent journalist said the programme reduces the rural artisan, craftsperson, fisherfolk, farmers into a mass of manual labourers digging earth on farm land or for check dams where they already exist, not towards the asset they are supposed to create in the village.

She also said that land tenure is intrinsically connected to food security and both are interlinked and those working as negotiators for compensatory packages do not look at displacement itself.

Questioning the government’s rehabilitation and resettlement issues, Maheshwari said, “how valid is it to say that a farmer in rural India whose land has gone forever for an upcoming industry needs only Rs 3000 per month for the next 20 years \with so called “sufficient inflation index” which is a subjective criterion)?”

“Whose needs are being addressed here? For an industry with a profit margin of more than $5 billion or a family of four with cattle and livestock?”, she added.

Citing an example from Polavaram dam and displacement of families in Andhra Pradesh, she said that, “If we take the Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Relief Bill 2011, which points out that in case of irrigation projects, the compensation will be one acre in the command area, the question is, if the water from the project is already being streamlined to feed into these industries downstream, where in the command area is the government to find one acre land each to the displaced, which amounts to thousands of acres, which in AP case, have already been apportioned?.