A job not done

Till the middle of last year, Sarju Devi’s family lived a comfortable life by selling milk from her 10 cows. But things turned for the worse in September 2022, when six of her cows died within a week due to an outbreak of lumpy skin disease, a highly contagious viral infection that killed over 76,000 cattle in the state alone, as per government estimates released in March 2023. Currently, only two of her cows are giving milk, which, coupled with the ever-rising fodder prices, means that the family in Rajasthan’s Ajmer city is not earning enough from their traditional work. “Still, our income has not dipped by much,” says Devi. This has been possible because of a recent state government scheme that promises 100 days of assured unskilled employment to all urban dwellers who demand work, similar to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

Launched in September 2022, the Indira Gandhi Shahari Rozgar Yojana (IGRY) is implemented by urban local bodies, such as municipal corporations, councils and nagar panchayats, who in turn hire educated youngsters as rozgar sahayaks (employment assistants) to sensitise people about the scheme and mates to oversee worksites. By enrolling under it, Devi now works as a caretaker at a stray cattle shed run by the Ajmer Municipal Corporation in the city’s Panchsheel area. There are at least four other women working at the centre who lost their cattle to lumpy skin disease.

Rajasthan is the most recent state to launch an urban employment guarantee scheme, on the lines of MGNREGA. Two other states, Jharkhand and Odisha, started a similar programme in 2020 after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw mass-scale reverse migration from urban to rural areas due to the unavailability of jobs. Kerala was the first state to launch an urban employment guarantee scheme in 2011 to arrest unemployment. It was followed by Himachal Pradesh in 2019.

“Post COVID-19, the demand for a guaranteed employment prog-ramme for the urban population has gained steam,” says Amit Basole, head of the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. On August 5, 2022, Binoy Viswam, Member of Parliament, introduced a private bill, The Bhagat Singh National Urban Employment Guarantee Bill, currently pending for discussion in Rajya Sabha (see interview,).

Basole says that while the state schemes are a welcome step, they are unlikely to be as effective as MGNREGA, which is an Act passed by Parliament. The practical difference, he says, is that schemes can be discontinued or diluted by new governments.

Before MGNREGA, India has had a plethora of wage programmes but without the legislative guarantee of providing jobs on demand.

Down To Earth (DTE) travelled to two Rajasthan districts, Udaipur and Ajmer, and to Kerala to understand the performance and challenges faced by urban employment guarantee schemes.

A good start

Rajasthan launched IGRY with a budget outlay of Rs 800 crore, which is the highest allocation for an urban employment guarantee scheme by any state. In 2023-24, the state government increased the number of guaranteed employment days from 100 to 125.

In Udaipur, 6,769 job cards have been issued to date. “More than 400 people have already completed 100 days of work,” says Sunil Bora of Udaipur Municipal Corporation. City beautification is the most common work undertaken in Udaipur so far. It includes painting city walls, repairing water structures and afforestation drives, among others.

Talking about the initial trends, Bora says the scheme is seeing more enrollment from women than men. This is because women prefer to work in the proximity of their homes, which is promised under the scheme, while men focus on maximising their earnings.

When asked about the challenges, he says that currently the scheme only recognises unskilled work, which has limited its scope. The other challenge is the wage amount, which he says is not lucrative enough for skilled or male labourers. “A mate is usually a graduate and has a strong network in the ward. The person still earns Rs 271 a day, while a labourer earns a little less at Rs 259,” he says. In contrast, the market rate for unskilled labour in Rajasthan is around Rs 500 a day.

The works allowed under the scheme are traditionally done by private contractors, who pay higher wages to the labourers than what is paid under the scheme. “So people are apprehensive to demand work,” says Bora. Senior state officials, on anonymity, say the scheme by design provides lower than market wages to ensure that people only avail themselves of it as a last resort. They, however, agree that the low wage translates into limited participation and is also the reason many projects never get completed.

The low wages also explain why many beneficiaries continue to work beyond the scheme. Sajida of Gandhi Nagar, for instance, continues to work as a house cook even after enrolling in the scheme. “I leave home early in the morning to cook food at a few houses. By 9.30 am, I reach the job site under the scheme and leave for home at 3.30 pm. The scheme has meant that we have enough money to send our three children to school,” she says.

In Ajmer, besides beautification, the scheme is being used to revive Chaurasia, a 500-year-old pond located at one end of the city. When DTE visited the site, it saw some 200 woman workers cleaning the wild vegetation that choked the waterbody and desilting the pond. Once complete, city officials say, it will provide potable water to the residences near the pond and also be used for irrigation. “It should be ready before the monsoon, when it will store rainwater,” says Dharmendra Anand, junior engineer of Ajmer Municipal Corporation.

Rakesh Kumar Sharma, superintendent engineer at the Ajmer Municipal Corporation, says the city has recently started enrolling jail inmates under the scheme, who are tasked to repair jail buildings. Ajmer has till date issued over 11,500 job cards and given employment to 2,744 people, who have completed 391 jobs.

But not all is well with the scheme. A recent report by Centre for Research in Schemes and Policies, a Telangana-based non-profit run by 10 retired civil servants, on the performance of the state scheme highlights two challenges: payment delays and limited staff training. The study says 38 per cent of the workers complained of payment delays. It interviewed 56 members of urban local bodies hired exclusively for the scheme and found that 60 per cent of them had not received any training. As a result, the most common reason for wage delays in the state is incorrect or delayed data updation on the scheme’s management information system (MIS).

Mixed impact

Kerala’s Ayyankali Urban Employment Guarantee Scheme (AUEGS) is the only such scheme that is over a decade old. Today, it has 0.32 million families as beneficiaries.

Though similar in design, MGNREGA and AUEGS have differences in implementation. While there is a strongly defined available workforce in rural areas, the poor urban population remains scattered, and very few people are opting for the scheme that involves huge risk and less payment.

Even the enrolled workers withdraw unexpectedly because of the availability of other work in urban areas. The seasonal unavailability of the required human power is also a challenge. This is more evident during the pre-monsoon days, when the local bodies require a steady workforce to undertake works that can prevent the spreading of epidemics and waterborne diseases.

The scheme is also facing a budget crunch and limited spending. In the launch year, the budget provision was Rs 20 crore, but the scheme received only Rs 60.41 lakh. And only 17 per cent of it was spent. Till 2016, the yearly allocation remained at a maximum of Rs 7.5 crore, and the spending was hardly around 50 per cent. In the last seven years, the annual allocation has been around Rs 50 crore.

State government officials, on the condition of anonymity, say the scheme has failed to achieve its objectives. Even the utilisation of the workforce for house construction under the Kudumbasree poverty eradication mission achieved smaller results. Only the poorest of the poor are enrolling, as people are using it as a last-resort option.

T M Thomas Isaac, former finance minister of Kerala, says despite many limitations, the state has carried forward the scheme all these years and has also inspired other states to launch similar schemes.

The state has recently included AUGES beneficiaries under an MGNREGA welfare fund that promises pension, medical help for the workers and educational assistance for their children. “We have renewed our focus on AUEGS by launching the welfare fund,” says M B Rajesh, Kerala’s minister for local self-government. He adds that such a safety net would help attract more urban poor to AUEGS and the local bodies could ably utilise their services in completing projects and developmental initiatives.

Efforts are also underway to include the private sector in providing jobs under the scheme. “We are shortly opening training facilities for poor urban youth in basic jobs that corporate houses and industrial units can offer. Moves are also being made to bring about jobs for urban beneficiaries in rural areas, which require an additional workforce from outside. In addition, municipalities and urban panchayats would get a lot of flexibility to decide what to do under urban employment guarantee programmes,” says Isaac.

NEED A FRESH LOOK

India has had several urban employment and skill development schemes both at the national and state levels, but none of them have been able to arrest the problem of urban unemployment in totality. Experts say that an effective guaranteed scheme is a viable option. They, however, say the current state-level initiatives are unlikely to help the arrest the high levels of unemployment in the country. In April 2023, India’s urban unemployment rate stood at 9.8 per cent, which is 2.5 percentage points more than rural unemployment, as per numbers released by business information company Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

“The size of the schemes is quite small in most states ( Rs 100 crore or less) with the exception of Rajasthan. The wages are also low compared to the prevailing daily wages for casual workers in the private market. So unlike MGNREGA there are unlikely to be any general effects on urban wages,” says Basole, who in 2019 co-authored the report, “State of Working India 2019−Strengthening Towns through Sustainable Employment: A Job Guarantee Program for Urban India”.

The report calls for a central scheme that guarantees 100 days of work at Rs 500 a day. It also provides 150 contiguous days of training and apprenticeship at a stipend of Rs 13,000 per month for educated youth. The report estimates that currently “between 30 and 50 million workers in India’s small towns will be eligible for employment through this programme” and the scheme will require investment to the tune of 1.7-2.7 per cent of GDP, depending on whether employment is guaranteed to one adult from every household or every adult resident.

In November 2020, development economist Jean Dreze, in an article, proposed the Decentralized Urban Employment and Training or DUET scheme for the country. In it, Dreze recommended that the Centre should issue job stamps and distribute them to approved public institutions—schools, colleges, hostels, shelters, jails, museums, municipalities, and so on. These institutions would be free to convert each job stamp into one person-day of work within a specified period, as long as they arrange the work. The wages would be paid by the government directly into the workers’ account on the presentation of job stamps, duly certified by the employer. To avoid collusion, employees would be assigned to employers by an independent placement agency.

The trouble, though, is that the Centre is still not invested in the idea that urban India needs a guaranteed employment scheme, says Basole.

This was first published in the 16-31 July, 2023 edition of Down To Earth

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