NEW DELHI: Rajya Sabha member Brinda Karat has written to Union Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, seeking his intervention in checking violations in some States of guidelines of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS).

"Any programme of this nature will certainly have teething problems that can be solved with proper intervention and, therefore, I would request you to take these comments only as a measure of concern that the NREGS should not be weakened by vested interests. Also, nothing should be done from the Government side to reverse some of the positive instructions in the guidelines issued to the States, particularly regarding wages and work norms," Ms. Karat said.

There was a strong case for increasing the wages in States where it was below Rs. 60, because workers preferred to wait for some work in projects where wages were higher. States should be allowed to fix wages, taking into account the higher prices of essential commodities.

Related problem

A related problem is that of the absence of any foodgrain component as part of wages. With the virtual collapse of the public distribution system, the main expenditure was on food, which costs more. Some direct effort must be made to ensure that a foodgrain component was permitted in the wage payment programme, she said.

There was no record of gender-disaggregated data. The forms with district officials or block level officials do not have a separate column to note the number of women included in family job cards, number of women applying for work and the number of women who had actually been given work. It was necessary to rectify this. .

Women underpaid

Also, where men were not coming forward to work because of low wages, women at the site were forced to do earth-digging work also.

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