AID - Audit of NREGA Work in Gosani Block, Gajapati District, Orissa.

About 100 people from villages belonging to panchayats Bagusala, Uppalada, Kathala Kavita, M.S. Pur and Kantragada of Gosani block, Gajapati district attended the NREGA/RTI Acts workshop. It was found in the workshop that:
a) Job cards were not issued to several families. In some cases applications are pending in some cases people did not know how to apply. A oral or written application should be given to Gram Panchayat for Job Cards.

b) Those with job cards did not know that they had to further apply to Gram Panchayat for work stating the period when they are seeking employment. As a result most people with job cards have not applied for work and did not get work.

c) Few people who applied for work also did not get work as it was not available. They did not know that they had a right to unemployment benefit in such cases where work is not provided within 15 day of application.

d) Being a border district in many villages the language spoken by majority is telugu. They do not know how to read Oriya and hence did not understand their own job card that was in Oriya. Translations of the card need to be made available to these villages.

The NREGA act requires the same minimum wage to be paid to both men and women. In Orissa this is currently Rs 55/day. However the village people pointed out that women were being paid Rs 40-50 while men were being paid Rs 70-80 for works being done under this Act. One reason was that men refused to work for Rs 55/day -- though this is the state’s minimum wage, the prevailing wage for agricultural labour in this area is Rs 80 for men and Rs 50 for women. Thus in all villages while officially they are paid Rs 55/day as per muster roll, in reality they are paid at a different rate based on their gender. But how can someone give a man Rs 80 and show only Rs 55 on record? The answer was that they would write that he worked for more days than he actually did on his job card. But if they wrote two days for 1 days work and gave someone Rs 80, then balance Rs 30 was pocketed. Thus the male desire to be paid differently for men and women was exploited by the corrupt in the system.

(Orissa govt has recently announced that the minimum wage will be increased from Rs 55 to Rs 70 from Jan 2007)

People from Upplada and Ranadevi villages alleged that works were not being done as per the list we read out that is accessible from the NREGA website for Gosani block. For example in Uppalada, a cement concrete road and drain was to be constructed with a budget of Rs 1.15 lakhs to enable access to village market. However no drain was constructed. Moreover it was alleged that many more days of work were filled in job cards than were actually done by the people.

The next day we visited Uppalada to examine the newly constructed 150 feet long road and the absent drain (above left photo). The “contractor” (right photo above) who was a smiling young village man happened to pass by at the same time. He is part of the same village and not contractor by profession but was given the job to execute the road work. The reason he gave why more days of work were recorded in muster rolls and job cards than actually done by the village people was the following: The block office said that they were to employ only 15 labourers. However 40-50 village people showed up for work. So to satisfy the block office he filled only 15 job cards but paid everyone, and so had to mark that each of those 15 people had to work many more days than they did. The contractor said that there was lot of corruption in this work – he had to pay a hefty bribe to the panchayat committee. How was he to be paid as he was not a contractor but just executing the work on behalf of the Panchayat? The answer was that through his job card – it was his daily duty to supervise the work, for which he was eligible to a daily remuneration.

We then met people who did the work to construct the road – that is those who officially worked. In reality person after person produced job cards and said that they did not go to a single days work, were paid nothing. Yet their job cards showed as many as 25 days of work done per person. In some cases they did 5 days of work and were shown as having done 10-15 days. Some people didn’t have their job cards as they were still with the officials who took to fill them up.

1. L. Ranga Rao and family – Didn’t work, wasn’t paid. Job card shows 23 days of work under muster roll 00560 and 01568. (pic above)

K. Iswar Rao and family – Didn’t work, wasn’t paid, card shows him (and his wife) as having done 25 days of work under muster roll 01410, 01592.
K. Appa Rao and family – Didn’t Work wasn’t paid yet 15 days of work under Muster Roll 00536 to his name!
Gunna Jayamma and family: Worked 2 days was paid Rs 50 x days = Rs 100 at womens rate. Job Card shows 23 days of work under Muster Roll 00560 and 01568.
N. Savitri and family: She worked 3 days was paid Rs 150 (=3 x 50) . Her son worked 2 days was paid Rs 160 (=2x80). Their job card shows 15 days of work under Muster roll 1408, 1590. (pic below)

Their job cards were taken though they did no work. They gave them. But why did they give them? Their response: Just like we are giving you now we gave them then! Did you see that they wrote that you worked for 25 days. No, we can’t read what they wrote. Did you sign any papers – yes they asked us to sign in two places and we did. That was probably them signing that they received the money that they didn’t. Why did you sign? Because we know how to sign, that’s the only thing we know.

Why? Why did the people go to such an extent that they totally cheated their fellow villagers. The contractor/supervisor had to pay Rs 20,000 bribe to the panchayat committee to execute the project. This was the only way to get that money.

Because of 3 NREGA projects having been done in this village, where the panchayat committees collected bribes, questions are being asked sporadically by conscientious village people. However it appears that monies have been paid to several villagers in scale of Rs 1000 to ensure that whoever asks questions is threatened. Even in the time we were present people who came forward to point to injustice done to them were asked to shut up. With upcoming panchayat election the issue is burning.

All projects being done under NREGA so far in this block are in the range of Rs 1- 5 lakhs each. We saw another Uppalada project were corruption is on a bigger scale. So far about Rs 3.5 lakhs have been spent but only two walls around 170 feet in length have been constructed. The space between the walls has been filled with sand, not cement or concrete. Only a patch 3 feet long is made of concrete! The work done doesn’t justify the Rs 3.5 lakh expenditure. (left picture)

Board put up before project completion:

Impressive boards have been put up at each project site even before the work begins as to how much labour and material cost the project involved. These are boards that will remain permanently… it doesn’t matter that the payments made to those heads are actually different on the ground or as project is executed.

Meeting with Collector:

We met with the collector who is keen to follow up on the audit. He came up with some good suggestions such as the project completion actuals should be written on back side of boards that have been put. He also suggested that we conduct a joint audit to understand the corruption issues. He was wondering if piece rate was being employed for payments made. We pointed that there is a complication if people are paid by piece rate rather than day-wage rate in terms of transparency, since on job card and muster rolls, days worked are only being entered and payments made. If piece rate is being converted to effective day rate then the days entered won’t correspond to actual days the worker worked making the system murky. In any case this cant explain how people worked zero days were paid nothing and still days have been entered on job card. He mentioned that Orissa government policy will be to more and more pay by piece rate method.

We requested him for uptodate district and block level information on monies received and details of projects executed or being executed. As per the information put up on the web, Gajapati district has recd Rs 16.4979 crores this year and including balance left from last year had Rs 18.0420 crores for NREGA. Of this Rs 1.295153 crore was transferred to Gosani block.

-- Workshop and audit conducted by AID-Orissa team consisting of Pramod Panda, Ajay Satpati, Dhanada Mishra, Aravinda Pillalamarri and Ravi Kuchimanchi along with village people. We missed Ajay Kumar of APVVU who was supposed to lead the workshop but could not make it due to health reasons.