New Delhi, July 24: An NGO has questioned Madhya Pradesh’s credentials as India’s top performer in the rural job scheme, saying state officials had siphoned off at least 75 per cent of the funds by showing bogus projects.

A sample survey by the Delhi-based Centre for Environment and Food Security (CEFS), conducted across five districts of the BJP-ruled state, says just over a fifth of the official spending and project figures are true.

Officially, the state’s 4,346,916 eligible families were provided an average of 63 days of employment in 2007-08, against the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme’s target of 100 workdays a year. The CEFS survey says the actual figure was only about 13 days.

“The difference is so steep because corruption is rampant in the region. At the most, only 25 per cent of the job figures on the scheme’s website are real — the remaining are fake entries in the muster rolls and cards,” said CEFS director Parshuram Rai, who spent nine months in the five districts to help complete the survey.

“Most of these people don’t know what a muster roll is. So, if only 25 per cent of the actual allocated amount of Rs 2,891 crore is being spent under the scheme, then Rs 2,100 crore (75 per cent) is being siphoned off.”

A large number of families, especially Adivasis, in these districts survive by eating chapatis made of wild grass like jathara, the NGO says. It adds that migration from the state is continuing, with 70-80 per cent of the surveyed districts’ working populations leaving for cities and towns in search of work.

Data posted on the NREGS official website claim Madhya Pradesh was provided Rs 3,288 crore under the scheme in 2007-08 and spent Rs 2,891 crore. This is the highest in India, and is almost a fifth of the total funds sanctioned under the scheme in the country (Rs 15,000 crore) during the last financial year.

The NGO carried out its survey in the 125 poorest villages in the state, spread over the districts of Shivpuri, Chhattarpur, Tikamgarh, Dhar and Jhabua. (See chart)

According to the survey, the sample households were given only 10.61 days of work on an average during the first 10 months of 2007-08. Calculating from this, the NGO says, the average employment during the entire financial year comes to about 13 days.

“I was shocked to see the scale of distress migration from these areas. Here is a region where the highest amount of money is being spent under the job scheme —and these people, instead of working in their own villages, are working in the suburbs of Delhi as day labourers. Most of these people, while in Madhya Pradesh, didn’t get even a single day’s work,” Rai said.

The NGO says that real NREGS projects are hard to find in the state, but its survey team stumbled on many ghost projects. There were entries on job cards in the name of non-existent projects. Often cosmetic changes were made to existing roads, ponds and tanks and they were shown as fresh NREGS projects, it says.

The CFES also claims that no gram sabha was ever actually called in any of the sample villages to plan and approve projects under the scheme. The records, of course, show that many gram sabhas were convened by the sarpanches and panchayat secretaries, it alleges.