Modi Government's High-Tech Obsession Is Damaging In These Ways

The time has perhaps come to change the spelling of the word "inconsistency" to "Modi". After denouncing the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) right through his 2013-14 election campaign, in February 2015 he declared in parliament that the only reason to keep MGNREGA alive would be to showcase the failures of the Congress. "NREGA should stay as a proof of your failures...After so many years of power, all that you could do is let a poor man dig ditches a few days a month." 

That got him a few sycophantic laughs, but did not stop him from turning around a few months later (on the occasion of MGNREGA's tenth anniversary) and describing the same programme as the "nation's pride". In May this year, the Supreme Court in Swaraj Abhiyan v/s Union of India & Others metaphorically knocked him on the head by pointing out that "a success rate less than 50% is nothing to be proud of." For the sad, sad fact is that although the Act provides for 100 days of employment per year, in actual practice, the highest national average achieved has been under 47 days per year per household. Hence, the Supreme Court's remark about the success rate having been less than 50%.

For the numerous problems that beset MGNREGA and other social welfare programmes, the Modi government appears to be fixated on techno-fixes. The human element is neglected. Trust is reposed instead on inanimate objects like mobiles, internet, Aadhaar cards. This has led to hi-tech being privileged instead of direct human contact. As Jean Dreze has been repeatedly pointing out after visits to the field, such excessive dependence on hi-tech has caused "delays, authentication failures, connectivity problems", especially as "the poorer states...are least prepared for this sort of technology". Biometric identification is yet to be adequately rolled out for easy use by all: where, for no fault of the beneficiary, the anonymous machine fails to identify him, the poor man (or woman) is left with nothing and nowhere to go for redress. 

Where, says Dreze, the deployment of sophisticated technology to meet the mass needs of a largely poor and ill-educated, or even illiterate, population ought to be based on the principle of "minimum use, maximum safeguards", the Modi government's headlong rush to find technological solutions to human problems has resulted in "maximum use, minimum safeguards". Modern technology should, of course, be used but with full recognition that it takes time and learning stages for such technology to be fully comprehended by crores and crores of the poor; for techno-glitches to be removed; and for full transition from human agency to cyber space.

Brinda Karat in The Hindu has given an interesting example of what happens when even a highly competent bureaucrat, such as the Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Rural Development in charge of MGNREGA who had been complimented by the Supreme Court for being "extremely well-versed in the subject," takes to innovative technology in a sincere pursuit of better outcomes. The Joint Secretary in question has opted for WhatsApp to network about 300 of her fellow-officials in state governments dealing with the subject. But wherein this network do 28 lakh elected panchayat representatives figure? A closed shop of a few hundred babus is no substitute for involving lakhs of peoples representatives and crores of people in a programme meant to secure "the enhancement of livelihood security of the households in rural areas of the country by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in every financial year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work" as the Preamble to the Act succinctly puts it. This cannot be accomplished by a cabal of government servants; it calls for grassroots connections to the intended beneficiaries. That is why the Act provided for a lively involvement of the local community in translating legislative intent into action on the ground.

In practice, there is some token participation of sarpanches, little of the ward panchayat panches, and virtually none of the gram sabha. The micro-issues - the ones that really cause concern to the individual intended beneficiary - are subsumed under macro-headings that can be more easily handled by the bureaucracy - whether on or off WhatsApp. But the WhatsApp approach cannot deal with individual problems and the beneficiary has to wait for wisdom to dawn in state capitals or New Delhi instead of the local panchayat  finding an on-the spot answer to an on-the spot problem. 

Moreover, as Karat underlines, resort to mobile messages eliminates both transparency and accountability as instructions are not recorded on file; there is no public access to such communications; and messages can easily be deleted. It is only quite by chance that she has discovered one worthy on the WhatsApp network charged with running MGNREGA who is of the view that "we ought to desist from campaigns for enlisting demand and indulging in the mad race of more and more person day generation."

One wonders who is "mad" - those who seek funds to provide employment to the abandoned in desperate times of drought, or babus of this ilk?

The real issues relating to the implementation of MGNREGA require a policy and administrative fix, not further resort to exotic technology. The Supreme Court has endorsed the intuitively obvious view that limited budgetary provisions amount to an "informal cap" on funds. This, in effect, means that those responsible for the programme are unable to encourage voluntary unskilled manual labour, and hold demand down to funds availability, thus making nonsense of the claim that the scheme is demand-driven. When the need for employment grows overwhelming, restrictive budgeting causes prolonged delays in payments of thousands and thousands of crore of unpaid dues to really needy people. The Supreme Court has drawn attention to the resulting "chicken and egg situation - the release of funds by the Government of India is low because the performance of the state governments is poor and the performance of the state governments is poor because the release of funds by the Government  of India is low." The court has held that it is a transgression of their constitutional rights, in particular Article 21,"when the rights of tens of thousands of people are affected by delayed payment of their dues."

Therefore, while the proposal for a National Electronics Fund Transfer System is commendable in itself, such technological legerdemain will not resolve the governance (not technological) issue of the "informal cap" on MGNREGA funds imposed by the Union Finance Minister that, in turn, puts a cap on generously meeting demand for work in conditions of extreme distress and leads through delayed payments to a "modern form of begar" as the petitioner put it. 

Because of the Modi government's absence of human contact and its obsession with hi-tech gimmicks, the real problems of the poor are being sidelined while the Modi government toys with bizarre schemes of scrapping MGNREGA altogether, or, in the alternative, of restricting the programme to one-third of India's most backward districts. It is now considering "targeting" without recognizing that the scheme as it stands is already targeted as it is only the really needy who would want to undertake the backbreaking tasks of unskilled work under the boiling sun for what amounts to a pittance.

I do not expect the Modi government to mend its ways but do note that neglect of the lakhs and lakhs of elected representatives has already lost the BJP 75 per cent of the positions in Gujarat's Panchayat Raj Institutions. Technological gee-gaws do not vote; people do.

(Mani Shankar Aiyar is former Congress MP, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.)

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