The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are not only on the periphery of the country cartographically, but also that of "mainlander" consciousness. A recent visit to the Islands to assess the functioning of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme provides a compelling case for the islands to figure more prominently in popular discussion of the MGNREGA.
The manner in which the district of North and Middle Andaman has leveraged the MGNREGA imaginatively to address the needs of a resource-constrained community against formidable odds offers important lessons for many states on the mainland.
There are few productive employment opportunities in North and Middle Andaman, given the heavy dependence on the mainland for basic supplies and underdeveloped tourism, agriculture and fisheries. Ninety per cent of the islands comprise reserve forests and it rains for nearly eight months in a year. Until 2010, the major source of employment here was one matchstick and plywood factory each, both of which shut down due to environmental concerns. The MGNREGA thus offers a lifeline.
Yet, there is no dearth of constraints to implementing the scheme on the islands. One of the biggest challenges in implementation is network connectivity. With so many processes, from demand capture to payments, depending on communication technologies, notoriously unreliable connectivity renders even the simplest tasks, such as generating muster rolls, Sisyphean.
Coastal zone regulations make it hard to secure permissions for a large number of potentially useful works. Poor land titling limits the extent to which smallholders can use the MGNREGA for land improvement. Regulations on cutting trees constrain plantation works and materials are expensive since they are imported from the mainland.
A lack of appropriate administrative guidelines too is a perennial problem. For example, the Schedule of Rates (that establishes wage rates for different tasks) followed here is based on the soil types in Delhi.
The district authorities negotiate these constraints to deliver the programme with varying degrees of success. In 2014-'15, 37 days of employment were generated, with a peak average of 42 days in 2011-'12. Close to 46% of rural households work under the programme. Average wages paid were Rs. 167.69 per day (where wages were Rs 400 when non-MGNREGA work was available). As many as 49.67 % of all workers are women (their share is 48.07% in the population) and worker profiles suggest that the programme is inclusive of the otherwise marginalised tribal population (mainly the Nicobarese). The MGNREGA is an important fallback option for young men in rural areas.
The success in creating durable assets is even more impressive. In Pokkadera gram panchayat, the community has taken up mangrove rejuvenation on three different occasions since 2009-'10. The Gram Rozgar Sevak (the village MGNREGA functionary) informed us that increased awareness of the role of mangroves in coastal protection generated enthusiasm in the community for this work.
Forest department officials identified denuded tracts along the coast that were vulnerable to flooding and sourced seedlings from thriving mangroves in another location. The seedlings were planted using MGNREGA labour and have since been maintained by the forest department.
Apart from their intrinsic ecological value, mangrove restoration and conservation sites have been developed as tourist attractions – as parks with playgrounds, for example, at a walkway and interpretation centre at Sabari panchayat.
Rural connectivity works have given communities, settled in the mid-1950s, access to a pucca road for the first time in Dasatpur. In Aamkunj, fishermen now have easy access to the water through a road where previously none existed.
Other types of work taken include bunds and gabion structures – for example in Kaushalya Nagar and Urmilapur, to protect agricultural land from saline water flooding. Pastures and shelters for ruminants support animal husbandry and fishponds enable farmers to rear fish as food and for the local market.
More recently, there has been an effort to create anganwadis (in Swadesh Nagar, for example) and toilets, the former at lower costs than elsewhere in the country. For many of these structures, designs that use locally available materials would be an improvement over currently prescribed designs.
North Andaman has successfully overcome constraints through creative leadership and a crew of local functionaries committed to the fundamental goals of the programme. With little connectivity and Aadhar seeding of just 8%, the district administration has relied on strong village governance institutions and simple transparency norms, to ensure that leakages are minimal.
This is in contrast to the range of technological “solutions” proposed nationwide, like biometric authentication, electronic funds transfers and e-muster generation, among other things, purportedly to check leakage, that in a context like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands make administering the programme virtually impossible. Most of the complaints that surfaced in independent discussions with the workers pertained to inadequate generation of employment and occasional delays in wage payments, but virtually none about leakages or corruption.
There is a high degree of transparency, with each completed worksite boasting permanent information boards that display the expenditure, person days generated and the material labour ratio, among other details.
The MGNREGA in North and Middle Andaman points to the possibility of effective implementation even in the face of overwhelming constraints, where the essential ingredients of success are defined in terms of simple principles of transparency and an adherence to the fundamental goals of the programme, in letter and spirit.
This article is based on a visit by the authors to the North and Middle Andaman in January 2016 as part of a series of visits to districts shortlisted for annual district awards by the Ministry of Rural Development. North and Middle Andaman won the award for Sustainable Livelihoods Convergence at the NREGA Sammelan held in New Delhi on February 2, 2016.
Sudha Narayanan is an Associate Professor while Krushna Ranaware is a Research Assistant at IGIDR, Mumbai, I. Balu is a Research Associate at NIRD & PR, Hyderabad. The views expressed are personal.
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