NREGA in Andhra Pradesh - Field Diary

Andhra Pradesh has been an important centre of research and evaluations for NREGA implementation. It has been acknowledged for best documentation of implementation and hence is known for its transparency in implementation. Extracting some introduction for Andhra Pradesh from my earlier blog http://www.indiadevelopmentblog.com/2009/06/nrega-snapshot.html , It has an average of 22.2 person days per rural household which is on a higher side and around 60% participation of women, which is again amongst the top scores. With an average wage of Rs 83 per day, it has a biggest chunk of wages being disbursed through post offices (around 60% of total wages), as compared to all other states. As analyzed by Prabhu Ghate, “AP has the advantage of relatively good quality of lower level field staff, has the advantage of managing the programme through mandals, which are smaller than blocks and therefore closer to the ground. It is unique in having institutionalized the social audit process through an autonomous state unit which makes a huge difference to the quality of the programme, has a good MIS (designed by TCS), and is spending more than 4 percent on administration of the programme, using its own resources to pay for the excess amount.”

As a part of our project, I and Sankar (another intern based in Hyderabad) went to 2 mandals (Ongole and Addanki) in Andhra Pradesh to gauge the ground level implementation of NREGA and facilitate our data analysis with some realistic field information along with a target to clarify some of our doubts about available data on NREGA implementation in AP (We went to 3 villages; Muktinutalapadi, Trovugunda and Venkatapuram). Our goal was to understand administrative hierarchies in NREGA implementation, clarify some issues in muster roll data of AP, analyze the social audit system and reports, and clarify issues relating to some data which can be our future avenues for research. We interviewed head of mandal level officials, head of gram sabha, field mates, field assistants, technical assistants and wage seekers (households). Here I present some of the crucial findings of our field work:

The flowchart shows the hierarchy of all officers involved in the implementation of NREGA (we gathered this information by interviews with officials). Every year in months of Jan-Feb, MPDO, APO, Technical officers and field assistants meet with gram sabha and identify the works. These work proposals are evaluated in terms of budget and collector issues a cheque to the MPDO for the budget. Budget is calculated by assessing total value of wages to be disbursed to the people in all working days (wage x days x workers). To demand work people approach panchayat secretary or field assistant and also they are informed about the works being conducted so that they can participate. Work calendar is also decided in the same meeting, which is generally during summers. Accordingly job cards are issued. During workdays all muster rolls are submitted to mandal office on Saturday and accordingly on Monday cheques are issued, which goes through a technical check and is credited in post office accounts by Tuesday. MPTC meets quarterly with around 90% attendance. They do follow up of earlier meetings and decide on some new worksite proposals in accordance with work demand (if any). MP and MLA’s so not have much involvement, there roles are only to supervise and give occasional suggestions. Main persons involved are APO and MPDO.

Regarding budget: it is unlimited depending upon the amount of workdays identified in a village. There is no limit as to how many workers will be employed. All work demands are taken care and if not possible in same village, they are provided work in another village. If they are not being provided work, they are entitled to an allowance of Rs. 40 per day for 1st month and Rs. 20 thereafter.

All new worksites are proposed in meetings are looked upon by technical officer who approves them and accordingly the budget in made and send to collector for sanction.

Social Audits: There is a requirement for keeping a Xerox of all muster rolls in gram panchayat office. Social audit in conducted once in a year and this is in two stages: official and village level. In official level, there is cross checking of all bills and receipts etc to and from collector’s office and in village level it is the verification of payment through muster rolls. VSA (village social auditors) are responsible for it and few others like SRP (state resource person), DRP (district resource person) are also involved. It takes 1 week to complete auditing in 21 villages and each village has 3 auditors (both mandals we visited expect the social audits to come in few weeks).

NREGA wages are determined according to the group setting. Let’s look at the group setting first. People are divided into groups of 20 are there is one Mastery (Mate) over a larger group of persons. A group of 20 people are given one work and they have to complete it in stipulated time. If group as a whole completes work in time, irrespective of individual worker, than they are paid full wages (min 100 and max 125) depending on the hard work required and season (max wage in April due to hot weather). According to the MPDO, minimum wage will be revised to Rs. 120 from now. If they could not complete the work in time as a group, then all wages are accordingly slashed. All payments are made through post office accounts only and the post master is responsible for later stage disbursement.

Skilled wages: It is nothing but material component of total expenses (officers are still unsure about different appearances in datasets).

About Rs. 3200 payment for 40 days: There were entries in weekly muster rolls about payment of Rs 3200 for 40 days, which seemed unusual. They are made for “Indramma Housing Scheme”. Wherein each household is provided 3200 rupees as wage cost for 40 days and provided all building material to construct houses once they have build a platform to raise house themselves. These payments are made through bank accounts specially created for this purpose. Entry in muster role for this scheme is not made by field assistant. This scheme is withdrawn now. NOTE: Indramma was a state scheme.

Apart from that, we had some other observations which are as follows:

1. Attitude of sarpanch in all villages we visited is not very positive about NREGA. They claim that wage labor is hired during agricultural season @ Rs. 200-300 per day. When we talked to households, they also confirmed that normally they get higher wages in agricultural season so there is no incentive to work in NREGA but during non agricultural season a few of them are interested in working more to bring about income stability. Sarpanch of one village had concerns about rising commodity prices but fewer rises in NREGA wages. Also we came to know that many NREGA works like land leveling, road side forest cleaning, road repairing etc suffers heavily from rain and these are washed out, so no asset is created.

2. One very important observation we have had is regarding the caste segregation. Only one of the villages we visited had worksites segregated on basis of caste and this village had predominance of caste leaders. Caste leaders held up the job cards of workers and were representing their caste in meetings where calendar days are decided for work. Workers are unaware of most of the payment related things are not at all involved when it comes to meetings etc. May be that is why they are not able to demand more work if they want. Also it was the only village where there were no records of muster roll kept in panchayat office and field assistant had no specific documentations (which were common in other very remote villages). In the same village few households who had received payments for Indramma scheme were aware of it (asked back in different survey, they showed the passbooks) and had newly constructed houses but a few of them were totally unaware about the 3200 payment and were still living in primitive houses (in other villages it was easy to locate an Indramma house due to its specific construction and logo/board etc).

3. About value of work done: At the end of each week, technical officer and field assistant measure the amount of work done (value of work) by using many scales, maps, guidelines, for e.g. In one village the value was measured as Rs. 117.50 for every cubic cm deepening of water body. I have got a new research idea from this, I will gather this data and calculate worker productivity and try to relate it to various other variables like amount paid, election results etc (I have already done some preliminary work on it, results are encouraging).