The Government has in parliament that the unemployment rate in rural areas almost doubled from 2.9% in 2013-14 to 5.3% in 2017-18. In the same period, there was over 50% increase in unemployment in urban areas. The most striking trend has been the rise in unemployment among urban males from 3% to 6.9% during the two year period from 2015-16 to 2017-18.

Replying to a question by Congress MP Kumar Ketkar in the Rajya Sabha yesterday, on whether the unemployment rate has been rising every quarter, the minister of state for labour and employment Santosh Kumar Gangwar said on Wednesday that in urban areas, the unemployment rate increased from 4.9 to 7.7% during the period.

The minister said that the figures were based on the results of the annual Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO) under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation during 2017-18 and the annual employment-unemployment survey conducted by the Labour Bureau, Ministry of Labour and Employment.

According to these surveys, he said, the estimated unemployment rate in rural and urban areas for those 15 years or older was collated and determined. The data revealed that the unemployment rate in rural areas grew from 2.9% in 2013-14 to 3.4% in 2015-16 and 5.3% in 2017-18. In urban areas, the unemployment rate first dipped from 4.9% in 2013-14 to 4.4% in 2015-16, before rising sharply to 7.7% in 2017-18.

Region Gender Survey by Labour Bureau Survey by NSS (PLFS)

2015-16           2017-18

Rural Male       2.9                   5.7

Female             4.7                   3.8

Person              3.4                   5.3

Urban Male      3.0                   6.9

Female             10.9                 10.8

Person              4.4                   7.7

Rural

+

Urban Male      3.0                   6.1

Female             5.8                   5.6

Person             3.7                   6.0

 (Note: Survey methodology and sample selection are different in PLFS and Labour Bureau survey)

In response to another question by Congress MP Anand Sharma on whether India’s unemployment rate has risen to 8.5% due to the economic slowdown and contraction of industrial output, the minister responded by only providing the data from the same PLFS Survey. He said that as per the Region Gender Survey conducted by the PLFS, in the two-year period between 2015-16 and 2017-18, the unemployment rate among rural males increased from 2.9% to 5.7%, while for rural females it dipped from 4.7% to 3.8%. Overall, it increased from 3.4% to 5.3%.

In the case of urban areas, the overall unemployment rate increased from 4.4% to 7.7% with the rate more than doubling for urban males from 3% to 6.9% during the same period. In the case of urban women, it came down slightly from 10.9% to 10.8% in the two-year period.

The minister also stated that during 2017-18, the estimated labour force participation rate for those 15 years and older across the country was 75.8% for males and 23.3% for females.

On the steps taken by the government to improve the employment scenario, Gangwar stated that the private sector is being encouraged and that various projects involving substantial investment are being fast-tracked. He said public expenditure on schemes such as Prime Minister’s Employment Generation Programme, MGNREGS, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana and Deendyal Antodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihoods Mission has been increased.

Also, he said, the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana has been initiated for facilitating self-employment. Under this scheme collateral free loans up to Rs 10 lakh are being extended to micro and small business enterprises and to individuals to enable them to set up or expand their business activities.

He said a digital portal has also been set up under the National Career Service Project to provide a nation-wide online platform for the job seekers and employers for job-matching.

Finally, he said, skill development schemes have been initiated to improve the employability of youth. And under the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme, the government will reimburse 25% of the stipend payable to apprentices to improve the employment climate.

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Previously when the monsoon rains arrived, villagers like Gangrude were assured of at least two months of work, earning between Rs 200-250 per day in the nearby rice fields. Now the work available has decreased and is more irregular. “The population is growing but the number of jobs is reducing each year,” Gangrude told IndiaSpend one hot March morning. “Last year some people got just three weeks of work in the whole season. With more machinery around too, the work is done faster.”

Gangrude’s husband is one of the lucky ones. A few years ago, he found a non-farming job as a tailor in the neighbouring town and earned Rs 6,000 last Diwali. But others, especially the village’s women, are often left jobless outside of the monsoon–the two-month period when the only farming work of the year is available. “After the plastic ban, an NGO came to the next village and taught the women how to sew cloth bags, petticoats and such things,” Gangudre said. “I would have liked to learn too but they didn’t come here; I don’t know how else you can find this kind of work.”

Kamal Gangrude, 35, with her son in Pimplad village of Maharashtra’s northwestern Nashik district. In the backdrop are the fields that used to provide a steady supply of farm jobs, but have now been sold to developers, thus restricting employment options for the village’s poor.

Like the villagers of Pimplad, an increasing number of women in Indian villages are being left with little employment options, except low-paid and erratic farm work. The number of female agricultural labourers in India increased by 24% between 2001 and 2011, even as 7.7 million farmers left farming, indicating how any limited, non-farming opportunities are increasingly being taken up by men, who are perceived as higher-skilled, better educated and more able to migrate for work.

This ‘feminisation of agriculture’ is “not to be celebrated”, said Ishita Mehrotra, assistant professor at Ambedkar University, Delhi, because farm jobs keep women confined to “low paid, insecure and oppressive labour relations”. Agricultural work is indicative of “a patriarchal ideology and a socio-cultural value system” that keeps women bound to the village and consumed with domestic work, while gender roles allow men to migrate for economic and social reasons, she said.

Mehrotra has authored a chapter on rural unemployment and inequality in Oxfam India’s second India Inequality Report, ‘Mind The Gap – The State of Employment in India’. This is the latest in our ongoing investigation of India’s jobs scenario, and is based on Oxfam’s analysis of the jobs situation in its new report and our investigation from the field.

Unequal economic growth

Despite four-fold growth in gross domestic product (GDP) since the early 1990s, India’s rural economy has undergone a crisis, with women and marginalised groups suffering the most as income-generating opportunities have disappeared.

An estimated 32 million casual labourers lost their jobs between 2011-12 and 2017-18, with 94% of those being farm jobs, according to a leaked National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) report published by The Indian Express in March 2019. At the same time, the proportion of employed rural women fell by 31% from 2011-12 to 2017-18, compared to a 6% reduction in employed men, reflecting how women have fared worst in the economic crisis.

Amid such turbulence, the country has seen numerous farmer protests, rising debt levels among rural households and falling crop prices, leaving the 600 million Indians dependent on farming struggling to get by. As a result, rising unemployment and agrarian distress have become salient election issues, with more than 70% of people in a recent survey citing a lack of jobs as a significant concern, IndiaSpend reported in March 2019.

Marginalised groups most affected

Non-farm activities now represent more than 65% of rural household incomes, as agriculture as the main source of income becomes gradually less prevalent, according to this 2017 paper released by Niti Aayog, the government’s policy think-tank. This reflects the way workers have had to diversify out of traditional, farm-based employment, as opportunities have shrunk.

The need to find alternative employment affects the working poor (who also are more likely to be Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims) significantly more than the upper-caste, landowning classes who can rely on trade and renting out of machinery, as examples of asset-backed wealth generation, the Oxfam report found. Wealthier rural households are also more likely to find skilled, white-collar jobs as a result of higher education levels.

As farm workers leave an unproductive agriculture sector behind in search of new and better employment, “who gets what job and under what conditions” remains governed by “unequal power relations” that are a norm in rural labour markets, the report said.

For example, 29 million rural women have vanished from the labour market between 2011-12 and 2017-18. When labour markets constrict and demand for jobs heightens, women are more likely to lose out, especially in rural construction jobs, said Ritu Dewan, former director & professor at the department of economics, University of Mumbai.

“One reason is the occupational and gendered technological division of labour,” she said. “Men tend to be higher skilled, potentially experts like carpenters and masons, for example, whereas on construction sites women are condemned to work as coolies, carrying bricks and cement, and are more dispensable.”
A lack of employment options and an increasingly desperate situation can also mean a greater chance of exploitation amongst marginalised groups, the report found. As the non-farm sector becomes “the single most important source of alternative employment” and many men migrate for work, women are left to bear the burden of keeping households running. For low-caste Dalit women this can mean taking up low-paid, and sometimes even unpaid, labour, in return for social security provisions by upper-caste landowners, Mehrotra explained.

“When men send money back to the villages from urban centres it comes irregularly and after long gaps, so on a daily basis where do you get your food from?” she said. “Often women become beholden to dominant castes, unable to dictate the terms of their employment just to pay school or medical fees.”

For women there can be an added layer of sexual exploitation too, as a condition for securing employment, Dewan found during her fieldwork across labour nakas (hubs) in rural areas. “Before you would see groups of waiting workers divided by skill, language and of course gender too; but now in the past two years and especially post-demonetisation a new division has emerged amongst the women,” she said. Operating with the upper hand as demand for jobs has decreased, employers have been asserting their bargaining power to divide the women on the basis of sexual attraction, with “the younger and slightly less-malnourished” separated from older women, said Dewan.

A reduction in the number of rural jobs is also translating into a decrease in the quality of work that remains, creating a “highly mobile and fragmented” workforce, the report said. Many workers (a group largely represented by the Scheduled Castes, the official name given to the lowest castes in India and regarded as the most socially disadvantaged), have a ‘multi-occupation’ existence, in an attempt to make a living through a mix of irregular casual labour, petty self-employment and migrant work.

While such work may pay more than agricultural labour, it still comes “no way close to providing a decent regular wage”. Indeed, the proportion of Indians expected to be involved in such ‘vulnerable employment’ is estimated to be around 77% by 2019, five percentage points higher than the South Asia average.

This is an indication of the extent of the livelihoods crisis in rural India, said Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, “where it’s hard to get enough days of employment or even full days of work in most activities, and no single activity is enough to provide a decent standard of life”.

While the negatives of such insecure working conditions are clear, Ghosh also pointed to a more worrying trend of an increasing wealth gap between “those with sufficient assets (like land and other wealth) as well as those with proper regular jobs (local bureaucrats, school teachers on regular payrolls, etc) and the rest”.

That rural job markets have been narrowed and it is poor, marginalised workers that are getting left behind is a situation that Mohan Kankate knows only too well. Pointing to large bungalows in the far-off fields, the 23-year-old narrates how the village landowners left some 10 years ago to build new, larger homes outside the boundaries–a visual display of how the two communities’ fortunes have fared over recent decades.

“I would say around 20% of the young men around here are working,” he said. “It is possible to find work in the city but no one really wants it–you earn Rs 6,000 per month but you only end up taking home Rs 2,000, and after such long hours and hard work as well.” As a result, many of the village’s youth are more often seen drinking alcohol and playing cards during the day, than seeking out an unappealing alternative.

Mohan Kankate, 23, and a resident of Pimplad, a village in Nashik district in northwestern Maharashtra, says only about 20% of the men in his village are employed. Most others spend their days drinking alcohol and playing cards.

Social norms hold women back

While up to 34% of men in rural areas have migrated in search of employment and better economic opportunities, the figure for rural women is about a tenth at 3.6%. Though out-migration can provide access to economic and social mobility, such options remain out of reach for many women in rural India due to “a patriarchal ideology and local socio-cultural traditions” that confine them to the village, the report found.

Sitting on the raised steps outside her home with her neighbours for company, Bharti Chabilal, 32, explained how women’s lower education status and the need for monetary investment mean it is mostly the village’s menfolk that can migrate for work to towns and cities.

“Each journey costs Rs 50 so not everyone can go. If anyone is going to travel into the city then and look for work, it will be the men,” Chabilal said. “They are more skilled and so more likely to get the job,” adding that she and many of her female peer group are only educated up to the 8th standard, while the men in the village mostly completed school, leaving after the 12th.

Norms assigning the burden of domestic care work like child-rearing, and time-consuming tasks like firewood and water collection, also mean few women are able to explore opportunities outside the village. This further entrenches their low socioeconomic status and exclusion from paid labour, the report said. Chabilal, for example, said with her list of household responsibilities that take up a large portion of her day, she has no option but to remain close to home. “We just go between our village and our parents’ village, rarely anywhere else,” she said. “We don’t get to hear about any available jobs in the area either, as the men do,” she added.

Bharti Chabilal, 32 (centre), with her neighbours sitting outside her home on a hot March afternoon, in Pimplad, a village in Nashik district in northwestern Maharashtra. While their husbands are able to migrate to nearby towns and cities in search of work, women like her have to stay behind due to the burden of household chores and a lack of education that reduces their chances of finding skilled jobs.

Her experience is common to many Indian women in rural areas, unable to join migration flows and find suitable non-farm employment, leaving agricultural labour as the sole option. While overall rural employment is becoming de-linked from agriculture (only 30% of rural households depend on cultivation as their main source of income), this is not the case for women, 75% of who are currently engaged in low-paid and unskilled agricultural work.

Not only are more women becoming concentrated in a form of labour that provides an “insufficient” source of income, but they also continue to face multiple forms of discrimination that indicate “wage relations are not just an economic contract”, the Oxfam report said. The gender pay gap, for example, among male and female rural casual workers is currently estimated at 45%, 10 percentage points higher than the national average of 34%, as IndiaSpend reported in August 2018.

Multiple women in Pimplad village confirmed that for men the daily wage rate for farm labour was Rs 50 higher than for women (Rs 250 vs Rs 200). “I’ve never really thought about it but I suppose women should be paid the same as men,” Gangrude, who we met earlier, told us. “But if you ask for more money they just tell you ‘don’t come’.” They use the fact that men do more heavy-lifting as the reason for paying them more, she told us, “but we are all doing the same amount of hours”.

When women are able to find alternative and limited off-farm opportunities, for example in home-based work, discrimination follows them. Their wages, skills and participation are all determined by “local value systems and patriarchal norms”, the report said.

The government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has helped provide some non-farm employment to women in areas where previously they may have been excluded, such as construction, the report said. The programme also helped raise women’s wages across the labour market. Indeed between 1993-94 and 2011-12, the national gender wage gap narrowed by 3 percentage points and was largely attributed to MGNREGS and its introduction of a rural minimum wage, in this 2018 report by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Economists like Dewan recognise the scheme’s contribution and call for greater investment in the face of rising demand for work. “In the early years of implementation, you did hear of upper-caste men not allowing MNREGA to be implemented in some areas since gender equal wages were seen as ‘insult’ to the men, but on the whole, it has been positive,” she said. “We need it to not only continue but in fact strengthen, particularly in the context of agrarian distress… At the national level, we now have 53% of workers as women, with some states reporting almost two-thirds.

While other government programmes such as the National Rural Health Mission and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education For All movement) have been able to provide occupational diversification for women, such as ASHA and Anganwadi (community health and childcare) workers, they have also perpetuated existing beliefs that social and care work can be remunerated at a lower rate, thus keeping women’s labour unequal.
“We need to not perceive women only as reproductive agents and secondary citizens who are only suited to social welfare, education and care,” Dewan said. “Women also exist in the wider economy and their contribution needs to be recognised, made visible and quantified.”

Policy measures needed

Despite the fact that 85% of Indian women are engaged in agriculture, no more than 13% own the land they till. Such dispossession and ‘landlessness’ means not only are women not officially recognised as farmers, but are also unable to access formal credit options that require asset-backed security, the report said.

Correcting the land rights issue could be a first step to creating visibility around women’s farming work, as well as “improving their bargaining position and intrahousehold allocation of resources”, said Mehrotra. This would also produce a “multiplier effect” that could lead to “better social outcomes”, she added, with numerous studies showing that women invest up to 90% of their income in their children and families, including educational materials and nutritious food, compared to 30-40% of men.

However, as of now, landless farmers remain excluded from government schemes that offer productivity generation provisions like subsidised seed prices and fertiliser. Delinking land ownership and farmer status, therefore, is a key way the government can help to improve infrastructure and institutional support, the report said. Many have also called for an affirmative action policy mandating 33% reservation for women in all public schemes supporting women farmers and which could raise their income level.

“The state governments of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have introduced rules whereby there are methods to identify all cultivators regardless of their land titles and ensure that they get access to government schemes,” said Ghosh, adding that there should be a “prerequisite” for women’s reservation in such schemes.

While supporting the agriculture sector through increased public investment in irrigation, better storage and transport facilities is a “priority”, in order to raise equity and employment standards in rural areas, there is also a need to focus on non-farm employment generation and raising skill levels with publicly-funded training programmes, the report said.

Any training programme targeting rural women workers should be “gender friendly”, given the patrilocal social norms governing women’s mobility discussed earlier. Providing transportation and childcare facilities as well as addressing barriers around cost and women’s domestic work responsibilities should all be considered.

As of now, women continue to be left out of state-funded training programmes, or at best driven into gender stereotyped activities such as tailoring and papad making, said Dewan. “In several states, you still find that training is only being provided for the economic activities which men are working in, excluding those done by women and which sometimes consist of up to 80% of all economic activities,” she said. “So not only are women’s contributions currently invisible, they are actually being ‘devisibilised’ or actively ignored.”

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend).

Courtesy: India Spend

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K.B.Vasanthi, 48, is a block panchayat member in Thalikulam block, Thrissur. She has been working under MGNREGS since 2008, and says if it weren’t for these wages, she would not have thought of contesting elections.
 
Vasanthi has continued to work under MGNREGS despite being an elected local-government representative, although not as much as before. “My husband has health issues and the money he earns from fishing hasn’t been great for a while. We had loans to pay and three children to take care of. MGNREGS work has been of great help,” she said.
 
Between 2008-09 and 2016-17, 90% of MGNREGS workers in Kerala were women. Nationally, women comprised, on average, 52% of MGNREGS work force, their participation having peaked at 57% in 2016-17.
 
Such high participation of women in manual labour was not always the norm in Kerala. In 2005, just 15.9% of the state’s women worked for a living, when the national average was around 30.7%.
 
“Back then, people thought it strange that we were doing manual labour, and made fun,” Devayani Kuttan, 52, who has been working under MGNREGS since 2008, told IndiaSpend, “They thought it was not worth it.”
 
The role of Kudumbashree, Kerala’s poverty eradication and women’s empowerment mission, has been significant in mobilising women for the unskilled labour opportunities that MGNREGS offers, and ultimately changing old attitudes. The complementarity between Kudumbashree’s self-help groups and the jobs programme has spawned economic and social opportunities that women have been quick to grasp.
 
How Kudumbashree mobilised women workers
 
The role of community-based organisations and self-help groups formed under Kudumbashree in enabling MGNREGS is well-recognised, as this 2012 Kudumbashree report noted.
 
Kudumbashree creates ward- and panchayat-level citizens’ groups that work in tandem with local self-governments to reduce poverty and improve governance.
 
At the ward level, groups play a critical role in registering labourers, preparing annual action plans for MGNREGS, and providing amenities at work sites. An executive decision by the government ensured supervisors for MGNREGS would be chosen from among Kudumbashree groups, and has made Kerala the only state in the country with 100% women supervisors, the report said.
 
“When the number of workers at one site is less than 50, the supervisors are considered as workers and given daily wages for unskilled workers. But when there are more than 50 workers, the supervisors are considered as semi-skilled workers and given wages of semi-skilled workers,” Vinodhini N., joint programme coordinator for MGNREGS in Thrissur district, said.
 
The works identified by Kudumbashree neighbourhood groups are submitted for discussion at village- and ward-level groups. Finally, the Grama Panchayath Committee gives its approval.
 
In this way, Kudumbashree has paved the way for MGNREGS.
 
The preponderance of women in MGNREGS, meanwhile, has resulted from the gender wage gap in the state. Men earn more than women in other jobs, whereas MGNREGS pays men and women the same wage. So men have been less interested in MGNREGS, leaving the field wide open to women.
 
Wage difference
 
Kerala has the widest gender wage gap for casual wage labour (unskilled non-public work)–at Rs 227 per day, men earned Rs 107.3 per day more than women in 2012, according to this MGNREGS Sameeksha (assessment) report.
 
Generally, in places with wide gender pay gap, more women participate in MGNREGS as men prefer other higher-paying jobs, the report said. But there are exceptions such as Punjab and Haryana, which may be explained by limited demand for non-public work, which pushes men to avail MGNREGS employment. Other factors could be non-availability of work suitable for women, or cultural reasons such as non-acceptance of women in the labour force, the report added.
 
Financial security and social ties
 
The Kudumbashree-MGNREGS link, by providing women with a sustained opportunity for work, has created a steady source of income for them. Currently, the wage rate under MGNREGS in Kerala is Rs 268 per day.
 
“Women know that they will get  equal pay for equal work which is not the case elsewhere,” said ward member Vasanthi. “If it was not for MGNREGS, I would not have stood for elections.”
 
Since getting employed under MGNREGS, many of her fellow workers have become vocal and confident, she said, adding, “The access to a source of income has strengthened their self-belief.”
 
Over the years, as more women have registered and shared their experiences, and the government’s mobilisation and awareness campaigns have begun to have an impact, the numbers have increased, MGNREGS worker Kuttan said.
 
Many women workers get offered casual work by other employers due to their MGNREGS experience. Kuttan said she saved money for her daughter’s wedding and bought jewellery from her MGNREGS savings.
 
There has been a four-percentage-point decrease in women’s participation in 2016-17, which an official–speaking on condition of anonymity–said was because more “scientific” methods were being used to assess workers’ performance, which may have discouraged the elderly and some other workers from taking up MGNREGS work.
 

Devayani Kuttan (left), 52, says times have changed since she began working under MGNREGS in 2008. Over the years, the wages have helped her finance her daughter’s wedding and buy jewellery, traditionally considered a moveable asset.
 
Often, workers deposit Rs 30-50 a week into the thrift fund set up by their local Kudumbashree unit. The small regular savings of neighborhood groups are pooled and given out as internal loans to the most deserving in the group, according to the Kudumbashree website. These loans are useful if members face immediate financial shocks. Members’ MGNREGS wages have enlarged this pool.
 
MGNREGS work has also strengthened bonds between workers, enabling elderly women to work, too. “The employment programme gives me a source of income. Who else will employ me at my age?” said 65-year-old Devaki, one such beneficiary in Thalikulam village, who only shared her first name.
 
At 13%, Kerala has the highest proportion of over-60 people in the country, IndiaSpend reported on October 7, 2017. When the work gets cumbersome, the younger workers lend a hand, Vasanthi said, adding, “Our interactions change our social attitude towards the elderly, and allow us to realise the work that goes into maintaining a community.”
 
Series concluded. You can read the first part here and the second part here.
 
(Paliath is an analyst at IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Bachcha Lal’s family in Banda, Uttar Pradesh, depend on his wages from MGNREGS work. Inadequate work, and delays in wage payment, have added to his problems.
 
“When the government first presented the MGNREGS to us, I thought that we’d get our money on time. I thought that I wouldn’t have to deal with abuse or unnecessary altercations, and that I’d be able to work well since it was a government initiative,” Lal told IndiaSpend. His experience could not have been more different. “We don’t get our wages on time. We could work for two days, but then remain unemployed for the next month or even the next year and a half or two years,” he said.
 
Launched in 2006, MGNREGS, the world’s largest rural jobs programme, guarantees 100 days of unskilled work to rural Indians such as Lal. It has 110 million active workers, and the wages it pays are an important source of income in Indian villages at a time when the farm sector is in crisis, more villagers are working as farm labour than as cultivators, and non-farm jobs are not enough to accommodate the large number of people entering the labour force.
 
Starting today, IndiaSpend will analyse the successes and failures of this scheme, and the challenges it faces, in a three-part series. This first part analyses budget allocations to find that despite heightened farm unrest, this year the government has set aside the least proportion of money for the scheme–48% of the budget of the rural development ministry–in the three years since 2016-17.
 
Reduced funding has resulted in 48% fewer projects getting completed over the six years to 2016. Although expenditure on wages now constitutes 73% of expenditure against the stipulated 60:40 wages-to-materials ratio under MGNREGS guidelines, delays in wage payment are frequent, as the second part will explore.
 
The final part will focus on how women in the state of Kerala have benefitted from MGNREGS, and what lessons that holds for policymakers.
 
This investigation is part of IndiaSpend’s series on the government’s performance on key flagship programmes in the run-up to the 2019 elections.
 
Inadequate funding
 
“There is massive under-funding of [MGNREGS] by the Centre leading to dilution of the programme,” Rajendran Narayanan, assistant professor at the School of Liberal Studies at Azim Premji University (APU), told IndiaSpend. He said allocation for MGNREGS as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) has steadily fallen–in 2010-11, it was 0.53% of GDP, and in 2017-18, 0.42%.
 
Adjusting for inflation and percentage of GDP (1.3-1.7%), the allocation for 2017-18 should have been no less than Rs 71,000 crore, Narayanan said. The actual allocation was Rs 48,000 crore.
 
Making this Rs 48,000 crore allocation, the government had claimed it was the highest ever. However, the programme had accumulated arrears of close to Rs 11,644 crore from the previous year that had to be paid, Narayanan said, adding that after taking out the arrears, the allocation amounted to about Rs 36,000 crore.
 
The allocation for the current year, 2018-19, is no more than last year’s revised estimate (additional funds requested beyond the budget allocation to meet excess expenditure) of Rs 55,000 crore.
 
As a proportion of the rural development ministry’s expenditure, too, MGNREGS spending is now the lowest in three years. In 2012-13, the share of MGNREGS was 55% of the ministry’s allocation. Since then, it has dropped seven percentage points to 48%.
 
The central government is responsible for 96% of MGNREGS implementation costs, as per the scheme guidelines: it pays the wages for unskilled and semi-skilled labour, and up to three-fourths of the cost of materials used. The state governments pay the unemployment allowance and the remaining cost of materials.
 
An applicant is entitled to an unemployment allowance if they are not given work within 15 days of their application being received. The allowance is at least one-fourth the wage rate for the first 30 days and not less than half the wage rate for the remaining period of the financial year.
 
Between 2012-13 and 2017-18, no more than 10% of households got 100 days of employment each fiscal year, defeating the professed objective of enhancing livelihood security in rural areas.
 
In 2017-18, the households provided 100 days of employment fell further by four percentage points to 6%, compared with 2012-13, as per figures available on April 28, 2018.
 

Source: MGNREGA Dashboard
*Figures have been rounded off
 
When MGNREGS expenditure overshoots the allocation by the central government, state governments make up the shortfall, which becomes a ‘pending liability’ for the Centre–the arrears mentioned above–this brief from Accountability Initiative explains. The cumulative liabilities until 2017-18 amounted to Rs 12,601 crore, twice the liabilities of Rs 6,355 crore in 2015-16.
 

Source: Accountability Initiative, 2018, Accountability Initiative, 2012
*Budget Estimate 2018-19
 
Assets created are useful, but few projects get completed
 
The scheme is designed to generate employment and create durable assets in rural areas.
 
With expenditure overshooting allocated budget, asset creation has been affected, largely due to payment delays.
 
“I do digging work mostly [under MGNREGS]. I worked as a farm labourer before this,” Lal told IndiaSpend in November 2017. Since MGNREGS employs unskilled manual labour, workers like him are often involved in digging-related works for soil conservation, horticulture, creation of sheds and farm ponds, etc.  
 
 
All such works fall under the natural resource management (NRM) component of MGNREGS, which account for 100 of the 153 kinds of projects that can be undertaken under the scheme. Of all NRM projects, 71 are water-related works such as creating recharge wells, water harvesting structures and check dams.
 
Thanks to NRM projects, 78% of households reported an increase in the water table, ranging from 30% in Muktsar in Punjab to 95% in Vizianagaram in Andhra Pradesh, according to a 2017 study of 30 districts in 29 states conducted by the Institute of Economic Growth, a think-tank.
 
Further, 66% of households said there was more fodder available after water-conservation projects on public and private lands belonging to marginal and small farmers (farmers who cultivate up to 2.5 acres and 5 acres of land, respectively).
 
Verification of 926 MGNREGS wells across six randomly selected districts in Jharkhand found that 60% of sanctioned MGNREGS wells were completed, according to this May 2016 Economic and Political Weekly report. Nearly 95% of completed wells were being utilised for irrigation, leading to a near tripling of agricultural income.
 
“Assets do get created on the lands of small and marginal farmers,” APU’s Narayanan said, “For example, land leveling is something that a farmer can requisition from the gram panchayat. It isn’t true that only large farm owners are benefiting from the scheme.”
 
However, nearly 12% of all sanctioned wells were abandoned before completion reportedly due to payment-related issues, the report said.
 
The scheme is designed so that material ratios are lower than labour or wage costs, Avani Kapur, director of Accountability Initiative, told IndiaSpend, citing as examples works such as water conservation, pond digging and tree plantation that require little material input. “Programmes in which material costs are significant, such as sanitation or housing, are usually run as convergence programmes with existing schemes,” she said.    
 
The gram sabha (village council) selects the works to be undertaken in the panchayat, and is expected to uphold the spirit of MGNREGS’ demand-driven approach. Often, this is not the case, however.
 
“If asset creation becomes targets-based and top-down, then one will hazard creating assets that are not useful,” said Narayanan, “How can somebody sitting in the state capital know or decide what is best for a gram panchayat that is far away?” The law under which MGNREGS operates clearly intended a gram panchayat-led, demand-driven scheme, he added.
 
At the same time, the quality of works has also been a cause for concern. One of the fallouts of low fund allocation of late has been that the recommended labour-to-material ratio of 60:40 has not been maintained.

The percentage of water conservation and water harvesting projects completed fell from 57% in 2009-10 to 2.5% in 2016-17. “Once you close a work officially, it becomes very hard to reopen (you’ll have to get three types of sanction–technical, administrative and financial). That is one reason for the percentage of works completed to remain low,” said Reetika Khera, an economics professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.
 
The proportion of works completed has mostly remained below 50% through the 12 years of MGNREGS, and has been falling in recent years. In 2016-17, work completed dropped nearly 13 percentage points to 2.74%, from 15.6% the previous year. The present allocation is unlikely to improve the situation.
 
Wages unpaid
 
“They owe me Rs 6,000 for the work I have done,” said Sukhrani, a 50-year-old woman who goes by one name, sitting on a charpai (string bed) in her small, unplastered home in Mavai village in Banda district. She said two people in her family have enrolled under MGNREGS. “It’s been two months we haven’t been able to afford milk. We scrounge and borrow to feed ourselves. We don’t even have slippers,” she said, “Sometimes we sell or rent parts of our field.” 
 
 
Delays in wage payment have been a constant throughout MGNREGS implementation. The guidelines recommend that wages be paid within 15 days of closing of the ‘muster roll’, the attendance register for a site.
 
However, a recent study by Azim Premji University has found that 78% of payments were not made on time, and as many as 45% payments did not include compensation for delayed payment as per guidelines.
 
Government data show the percentage of wages unpaid increased from 63.5% in February 2018 to 85.5% in March 2018 to 99% in April 2018, which part two of this series will explore in greater detail.
 
This is the first of a three-part series on the successes and failures of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.
 
Next: Despite ‘Record’ Allocation, 59% MGNREGS Wages Due Remained Unpaid In April 2018  
 
(This story has been produced in partnership with Khabar Lahariya, the country’s only indie, rural media platform, working out of Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, with an all-women reporters’ network. Paliath is a policy analyst with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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On March 5, 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tweeted that “unemployment rate falls sharply, as Modi government’s efforts to create rural employment are yielding results”.
 

The tweet claimed that India’s unemployment rate had fallen from 9.5% in August 2016 to 4.8% in February 2017, based on a report by State Bank of India (SBI) Ecoflash.
 
The unemployment rate in Uttar Pradesh registered the maximum decline during August 2016 to February 2017 from 17.1% to 2.9%, followed by Madhya Pradesh (10% to 2.7%), Jharkhand (9.5% to 3.1%), Odisha (10.2% to 2.9%) and Bihar (13% to 3.7%), Indian Express reported on March 5, 2017.
 
A FactChecker analysis of various data sets reveals that unemployment data in India is either outdated or unreliable, as multiple government reports and analyses give different figures.
 
India’s unemployment rate was 4.68% as on March 5, 2017, which is in sync with the BJP’s claim, according to real-time data from the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). Urban India reported a higher unemployment rate (6.13%) than rural India (3.9%).
 
On August 31, 2016, India’s unemployment rate was 9.7%; urban India had higher unemployment (11.14%) than rural India (9.01%), the BSE data reveal.
 
India’s unemployment rate was reported to be 3.7% in 2015-16, according to data presented in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) on February 6, 2017, by labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya.
 
However, on the same day, minister for state for planning Rao Inderjit Singh informed the Rajya Sabha (upper house of Parliament) that the unemployment rate was 5% and rising in India, especially among the backward classes (OBCs), Hindustan Times reported on February 6, 2017.
 
If the unemployment was declining as per the SBI report, why did the government admit to rising unemployment in the Parliament?
 
Over 30% of youth aged 15-29 in India are not in employment, education or training (NEETs), according to this 2017 report by Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Livemint reported on March 6, 2017.
 
India needs 23 million jobs annually, according to a Kotak Securities report, but over the last 30 years, the country has created about seven million jobs every year, IndiaSpend reported on February 23, 2016.
 
The government needs to focus on improving the measurement of employment and wages even as it works towards improving the ease of doing business and enhancing India’s manufacturing and employment capability, economists Dharmakirti Joshi and Dipti Deshpande from CRISIL had written in a column for Financial Express in June 2015.
 
“In July 2014, the Labour Bureau released the provisional results from its sixth economic census. This data pointed towards an increase in job creation rate in India in the last 5-6 years—a finding not supported by the NSSO data, sending out a contradictory message,” wrote Joshi and Deshpande.
 
(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

This article was first published on factchecker.in
 
 

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