NEW THREADS: Rural women supplement their income

Every year, thousands of people from rural India migrate to the cities in search of jobs. It takes them months, sometimes years, to finally earn enough to send money home to their families, who live in penury till then. The reason for the exodus is obvious enough. There is neither enough work for the people in the villages, nor money.

A proposed government Act hopes to change their plight. Under the preliminary draft of the Employment Guarantee Act (EGA) ? drawn by economist Jean Dr?ze and Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) co-founder Nikhil Dey in consultation with a host of political leaders, academicians, lawyers and bureaucrats ? any able-bodied person who applies for employment ought to be entitled to work within 15 days of his application within five kilometres of his or her residence. If the government is unable to provide work to a person, he or she is entitled to an unemployment allowance, which is one-third of the minimum wages as stipulated by government.

The achievement is two-fold, stress the supporters of the EGA. One, it will provide an incentive for people to remain in their villages by giving them work. A clause in the EGA draft stipulates that under the programme, the government can only undertake ?productive works?, which means work that either improves the quality of life in the villages, or increases production, or creates durable assets or even preserves the environment.

The EGA, if implemented, will be the biggest breakthrough in labour law since Independence. Economist Jayati Ghosh thinks that the Act is one of a kind, for no country in the world guarantees employment as a law. ?It is a breakthrough for the government to be willing to even discuss it,? she says.

Supreme Court lawyer Indira Jaising says the government is more inclined to implement labour acts as policies and schemes. ?We have not had any concrete labour laws since Independence,? she says. The EGA, therefore, has a huge number of active supporters, starting from author Arundhati Roy to former Prime Minister V.P. Singh to Marxist Politburo member Sitaram Yechuri who initiated a signature campaign last week to support the Act.

However, the EGA has its detractors as well, both from within and outside the government. And if they had their way, the proposed Act, although included in the Common Minimum Programme of the United Progressive Alliance government, might end up being an employment scheme.

Right now, the government has agreed to implement the Act with a few changes. Instead of year-long employment, at least 100 days of work will be provided. The government also wants to restrict the guarantee to just one person per household, instead of every person looking for a job.

And with these conditions, the Rural Employment Guarantee Act, as it shall be called for the time being, will initially be implemented in 150 districts and extended to the whole of India within five years. The government will set up an employment guarantee programme, which block officers shall be responsible for implementing at the local level. The government had earlier set a December date for the EGA to come into force.

The architects of the EGA draft, however, are not happy with the changes. ?The EGA needs to be implemented totally, not with any changes,? stresses Jean Dr?ze. For now, however, the Act will be put into force with the stipulated changes.

Another reason why the EGA has drawn so many detractors is the belief that the large public resources needed to implement an Act of this magnitude will make it unsustainable, as it would cost the government too much to bear. Jayati Ghosh, however, says that the Rs 40,000 crore approximately needed to implement the Act all over rural India forms less than 1.5 per cent of our Gross Domestic Product. However, if the government raises its tax-GDP ratio (it is one of the lowest in the world, and has been declining steadily for the last 20 years) to what it was in 1991 by realising some of the taxes it is owed, that would release enough GDP to implement the Act. All it needs, she stresses, is a little political will.

There is another aspect of the Act that has been ignored, and women?s rights activists want that to be corrected. Since the current scheme will provide for one job per household, women fear that they might never receive employment, especially widows and wives of migrant labourers. The National Federation of Indian Women therefore want the government to ensure that at least 40 per cent of the workers under the Act are women and that they are not pushed disproportionately onto the unemployment allowance, or even out of the scheme.

That might just ensure that the even the wives of the migrant labourers ? who may or may not want to come back to their villages ? can fend for themselves and do not have to wait for their husbands? money orders. After all ? if the differences surrounding the EGA are ironed out, and they just might be ? everyone in India will soon have the right to be employed.