The person who conceptualised work on demand for the rural poor is forgotten

There has been a din, and even justified, about the replacement of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA). It is being faulted on several reasons, including the structure of the programme under the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G Ram G) law, which claims jobs would be ensured for the rural poor, and the removal of Mahatma Gandhi’s name from the law.

The irony now is that the country has forgotten how the very concept of jobs-on-demand had evolved, which, several decades later, was adopted into MNREGA. The very genesis lies with VS Page (pronounced “pagey”), an MLA from Maharashtra’s Sangli district in the 1970s. He was later the chairman of the legislative council for an unbroken 18 years.

All the criticism and analysis which occupied acres of newsprint and hours of television time have been amiss in forgetting Page, including Sonia Gandhi, who is credited with getting Manmohan Singh to make the MNREGA, the demand-driven law. She also wrote about the role of MNREGA in the rural economy, wage improvement, etc. However, there was no mention of Page or even the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS).

Who VS Page was

In the early 1970s, he conducted a pilot programme in jobs for anyone who sought it because of the acute drought that had gripped Maharashtra. People began to move to any big town or city for any job they could secure. Railway stations were crowded, as they are when Bihari migrants go home for their chat festivities.

This was adopted as a rights-based, jobs-on-demand law and christened simply as the Employment Guarantee Scheme for the rural poor in 1976 by the Maharashtra legislature after an earlier unanimous resolution that something needed to be done to alleviate the lives of the rural poor. It had not abolished rural poverty but provided 100 days of employment just by asking.

Jobs had to be provided within a short distance of the village within a couple of weeks. The only requirement was that the person be willing to wield a crowbar or a spade to be entitled to work within a short distance of the village of residence. The work had to be provided within 10 days. Fifteen people had to ask for it as a group.

While the new VB-G Ram G law is a watering down of the MNREGA, it was modelled almost entirely on Maharashtra’s EGS. During the lifetime of MNREGA, the funds came from the Centre, which provided 90 per cent of the expenditure, while the states had to chip in with 10 per cent. During the period from 1976 to 2005, Maharashtra financed its programme entirely.

Those who knew Page and those aware of the jobs for the asking in the rural areas find the absence of any reference to the man who led the programme’s philosophy to be a serious omission. Maharashtra’s EGS is an intensely studied public policy programme in the country, and scholars from other nations, too, have studied it.

Vidyadhar Date, a senior journalist and public policy inquirer, wrote the other day on his Facebook page that Page was a “simple, sincere, dhoti and Gandhi cap wearing man, very experienced in public affairs,” but “since he was not an academic, he does not count and you will find almost nothing on him on the internet.”

Even Opposition applauded

The scheme, as suggested by the Page-led committee, was so well-pixelated that the then chief minister, Vasantrao Naik, not only promoted it but found ready acceptance by the Opposition. When it became a law, there was applause all around, but later, corruption did raise its ugly head. Muster rolls were sought to be inflated to pocket the excess by the system, but that did not derail the EGS.

Maharashtra devised a good way of finding money for the EGS without straining its exchequer, because the demand for jobs always existed. The professional tax, levied on some products taxed by the state, went into a fund. Any unspent money was carried forward to the next year, and a corpus was built.

It is here that a huge mischief was played by the state government. The law required that a “special account” be created, with funds kept in escrow and available whenever needed so the programme would not suffer from a lack of resources, but no such fund was ever set up.