The Hindu : National : Draft employment guarantee law to be tabled soon

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Wednesday, Sep 22, 2004

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National

Draft employment guarantee law to be tabled soon

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, SEPT. 21. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government will table a draft law in Parliament mandating 100 days of guaranteed work every year to one member of every rural family.

It will be moved early in the winter session of Parliament. The Standing Committee of the Rural Development Ministry will have to scrutinise it later.

Making this assurance here on Saturday at the National Convention on the Right to Work, Jairam Ramesh, the Rajya Sabha MP and senior Congress functionary, said that if all went well, the new law would be implemented in 150 of the poorest districts by April 2005. A sum of Rs. 25,000 crores a year was being set aside for this purpose. The number of districts would gradually be expanded so that most of rural India would be covered in five years.

Other speakers at the convention included the Planning Commission members, Abhijit Sen and B.N. Yugandhar, the noted economist, Prabhat Patnaik, the Magsaysay award winner and National Advisory Council (NAC) member, Aruna Roy, and activists representing more than 70 political and peoples' organisations around the country.

Mounting pressure

To mount pressure on the Government for speedy implementation of the law, the activists decided to work out a plan on October 16.

Prof. Patnaik described the 1990s as a decade in which the Government expenditure as a percentage of the GDP fell steadily, leading to a crisis in growth and employment in the rural sector.

He said that it was largely because of this that the BJP was voted out and there was a need for a reversal of the neo-liberal economic policies which had led to the chronic lack of employment opportunities.

"Guaranteeing at least 100 days employment implies a reversal of liberalisation, directly as well as philosophically, because it refutes the idea that you can leave things to the market, to trickle down, that there is no need for the State."

`No shortage of money'

Though the Planning Commission has raised questions about how the proposed law would be financed, "there is no shortage of money, in the sense that there is no shortage of real resources", said Prof. Patnaik. He said that Government spending on implementing the rural jobs guarantee would not be inflationary because foodgrain stocks were so high that they were being dumped in foreign markets and there was plenty of underutilised industrial capacity.

Spending on job creation would have a multiplier effect throughout the rural economy and could easily be financed through a half-percent tax on capital transactions.

Prof Sen said that though the UPA Government would cite the Fiscal Responsibility Act as a constraining factor, it was possible to generate the required resources.

Mr. Ramesh said that the draft National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2004, had been put on the website of the NAC (www.nac.nic.in) for public scrutiny.

He added that the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, wanted an informed debate on the issue prior to the Act's adoption.

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