Pitfalls in a promise: Rajasthan’s urban income security efforts throw up new challenges

Some recent events in the political arena signal that unemployment, particularly among the youth, has emerged as a major issue of concern for the parties in power at the Centre and states.

Early this year, during the elections to five state assemblies, media reports highlighted that young voters were disappointed at the shrinking opportunities for gainful jobs. Probably this prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to announce in June that the government would recruit a million candidates in various jobs over the next one and a half years.

Soon after, in July, in a somewhat different policy response, the Rajasthan government launched the Indira Gandhi Shahari Rozgar Yojana (IRGY-Urban), which is aimed at providing supplementary employment and livelihood support to the urban poor.

It may be recalled that large-scale job losses, particularly among the migrant workers in large cities during the strict lockdown imposed in the first wave of COVID-19, had triggered the demand for such a scheme in urban areas by several well-known economists and policy analysts.

More recently, the Standing Committee on Labour in its report of August 3, 2021, also recommended an urban employment guarantee programme for the urban workforce in line with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

The chairperson of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council Bibek Debroy had also endorsed this idea while releasing a report, “The State of Inequality in India”, in May 2022.

Surprisingly, all these discussions made hardly any reference to our past experience in implementing such a centrally sponsored scheme, Swarna Jayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana (SJSRY), which was launched in 1997 and continued till 2013.

SJSRY had a wage employment component for households living below the poverty line in urban areas with a population of less than 500,000, as per the 1991 Census.

The scheme offered employment to the eligible households in works for construction of socially and economically useful public assets, to be identified by community-level institutions, with a labour component of at least 40 per cent. It had a fairly elaborate programme implementation structure and guidelines like most other centrally sponsored schemes.

Why then, was it shelved? And what were the lessons learnt?

Regrettably, it is difficult to find any independent evaluation of SJSRY in the public domain. Concerns, therefore, abound about the effective implementation of IRGY-U, even though its guidelines explicitly mention that the scheme has been largely modelled on its rural counterpart, MGNREGA.

One basic reason for this apprehension is that in the context of a workfare scheme, the urban setting in India differs from that of the rural area in at least two significant ways.

First, in rural areas, the demand for work under such a scheme is expected to be largely seasonal. This is not the case in urban areas, where labourers usually work in the unorganised sector and live in slums or unapproved colonies, and are thus in the need of remunerative work almost round the year.

Second, the skillset of the urban workforce is far more varied than those of the rural workers, most of whom are unskilled. Besides, experts, including Debroy, have from time to time highlighted several concerns with regard to the design of the urban wage employment scheme, which may cause possible hurdles in effective implementation of IRGY-U.

Let’s analyse whether and how the Rajasthan government has addressed these pitfalls while formulating IRGY-U:

Concern: How would workers be identified under the scheme, even though it is demand-driven and involves self-selection?

Our assessment: All households residing in urban areas of the state are eligible to be covered under IRGY-U and can be identified by the “Jan Aadhaar card” issued by the state government for the delivery of welfare benefits. Thus, the scheme provides universal coverage, avoiding the risk of inclusion or exclusion errors.

Further, keeping in view the distress suffered by the migrant workers during the lockdown, the scheme provides flexibility to cover them in exceptional situations, when events such as natural disasters or outbreak of an epidemic triggers job losses.

Concern: What would be the modalities of issuing job cards to the eligible workers? Would the job cards be issued to individuals or to households?

Our assessment: The job cards are to be provided to the households, as in the case of MGNREGA, so that all adult members of the registered families can demand work under IRGY-U and can avail 100 days of work in a year.

Applications for these job cards can be filed either at the zonal offices of the urban local bodies or online at e-Seva Kendras (one-stop centre that facilitates electronic filing of various forms).

Concern: Unlike in rural areas, the scope for providing jobs in labour-intensive works for creation or renovation of community and individual assets is fairly limited in urban areas. Would there be enough ready infrastructure projects in the urban areas to satiate the demand for work?

Our assessment: Under IRGY-U, work is required to be provided to the job-seekers on demand within 15 days. Since urban areas have different requirements than rural areas, the scheme offers a wide range of projects that can be taken up.

These include works for ecological protection, such as tree plantation, raising of nurseries and maintenance of plantations, public parks and gardens; works for water conservation such as rainwater harvesting and renovation of public tanks and waterbodies; works relating to sanitation and solid waste management including doorstep collection and segregation of household waste, cleaning of drains and public toilets; works required to save public property from defacement.

Further, convergence works to provide additional resource support for other central and state schemes such as Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban); multi-task services and record-keeping work in the offices of urban local bodies; heritage conservation works; and miscellaneous works such as development and management of parking spaces, traffic management at busy crossings, fencing and protection of public lands can also be included.

Thus, doubts about the limited scope of labour-intensive works for an urban wage employment scheme are possibly misplaced.

Concern: Can some form of skill upgradation be built into the scheme in the nature of an apprenticeship programme?

Our assessment: Ordinarily, the wage component of a selected work is prescribed to be at least 75 per cent of the total cost of each project. However, for special projects, which require higher material component, technical assistance and skilled workers, the limit of expenditure on material cost can be up to 75 per cent.

It may also be noted that the scheme does make a special provision to offer jobs to the urban educated youths as apprentices in the urban local bodies. Workers would be paid minimum wages notified by the state government for the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled categories.

Concern: If work cannot be provided because of non-availability of eligible projects or for any other reason, would unemployment insurance be payable? Which agency would execute the works on the ground, since the institutional apparatus of urban local bodies at the ward level is fairly weak?

Our assessment: The guidelines envisage official-level committees at the level of state, division, district and urban local bodies to coordinate and monitor implementation of the scheme, besides mandating social audit and grievance redressal mechanism.

Limitations still

While it is too early to comment on whether and how the scheme would deliver the intended outcomes, some of the significant limitations in its design are apparent.

First, the scheme, contrary to its nomenclature, does not provide any “guarantee” of entitlement of 100 days of work to the registered households. The guidelines do not spell out any provision of payment of unemployment allowance to the workers in case employment is not provided within the prescribed timeline.

Second, the scheme hardly provides any opportunity to the citizens and community-level institutions to participate in the implementation process, particularly in project identification, selection and approval. This is a significant departure from one of the basic features of MGNREGA, which mandates approval of the projects by gram sabhas.

Even SJSRY had assigned a prominent role to the community development societies in the execution and supervision. A scheme like IRGY-U ought to have been utilised by the state government as a platform to energise civic participation in urban rejuvenation.

IRGY-U could have tried, at least as a pilot, implementation of projects through the alternative Decentralised Urban Employment and Training model suggested by eminent economist and social activist Jean Dreze.

We have seen that efficacy of social audit in mitigating corruption and leakages in MGNREGA has been unremarkable, even in Rajasthan where grassroots civil society groups are quite active. It remains to be seen how this institutional apparatus of accountability would be an effective deterrence in case of IRGY-U, where it does not have even a legal backup.

Jugal Mohapatra is former secretary, Union Ministry of Rural Development. Siraj Hussain is former secretary, Union Ministry of Agriculture, and co-promoter of Delhi-based think-tank Arcus Policy Research

This was first published in Down To Earth’s print edition (dated 16-31 August, 2022)

Governance India