For innovation in the Mahatma Gandhi national rural employment guarantee scheme (MNREGS) that has paid off big, one needs to look at Kandhamal.
The hill-locked district in western Odisha may seem the unlikeliest place for such success, though. For a start, it is one of the most backward regions in India’s poorest state. Throw in the terrain — most of the district is spread on the undulating Eastern Ghats — and the communally divided population of tribal folk and scheduled caste Christians, and cohesive development work becomes an administrative nightmare.

Worse still, it happens to be a part of the ‘Red Corridor’, where the writ of Maoists often supersedes that of the state.
But it is here that one sees the best intent of the community-assets clause of MNREGS guidelines materialise in real terms; so much so that it has become the new paradigm for rural development here.

In 2009, the district administration, partnering with five NGOs, started an integration of natural resource management with MNREGS. The project envisioned bolstering agriculture as livelihood in villages by harnessing natural resources of the region like rainfall, soil and natural springs. This harnessing was to be done by the villagers under MNREGS work orders.
The work has created community assets like earthen dams, ponds, stream linkages, farms and wells — all resources that have helped agriculture diversify and thrive ever since.

Governance Now found resounding evidence of the success by the road to Nadapatanga, a small village in Baliguda block. The winter here is tinged with the yellow — a dull one of ripening paddy and a bright one in patches where mustard is in bloom. It is hard to believe that these fields were once pastoral, low-productivity land earmarked for grazing livestock for most of the year (except for the kharif season).
Chaman Dandiya, a 50-year-old fledgling farmer, says, “Barsare paani bali dhoi aanu thila pahadaru. Sabu khetare bali chari jauthila. Miccha kahibini aagyan, abika dhana fasala bhala hauchi (The rains would bring washed-away sand from the hills and deposit it on our fields. Now, I swear, the harvest is much better.)”

It is intriguing. Chaman had, a few minutes before that, seemed all set to tear into MNREGS implementation with complaints of payment hassles but was now placated by his own afterthought.

Trenches the fodder, how green is the valley!
The fields carpet most of the slope at the base of the hill on which Nadapatanga nestles, even patches along the cobbled exit from the tarred road that leads to the village. Most of these were created under MNREGS again as land-levelling projects. Villagers cleared the patches of forest and took to tilling the land. A few hundred metres ride from the village up the road, there is an abrupt break in views as the fields and the forest seem to merge in a flux.
I am on a motorbike with Sanjay Swain, who works with Pradan, one of the NGOs involved in the project. We stop by a clearing. From here, we have to walk down a trail to see the fount of Nadapatanga’s new-found prosperity, I am told.

Trenches dug by the field are tell-tale signs of the project. Around 100 metres from the road, Nadapatanga villagers have dug an earthen dam on the hill to make a reservoir that harvests all rainwater flowing down two rain-fed streams. The trenches one saw before are the drainage that leads to the fields down the slope. A little money and labour, brought together by MNREGS, has helped set up an indigenous irrigation system!
Though the dam is dry in the winter, it isn’t hard to imagine how the controlled release of water must have helped the crops grow.

We are headed back to Nadapatanga when Sanjay offers to show some fields irrigated by water harvested from a perennial stream, using the same natural resource management technology. We stop by a field where a woman is bent over the last of her harvest — the family’s first paddy crop this year crop but she is planning to sow daal or a vegetable for the rabi season, she adds.

This, in fact, is a place where despite abundant rainfall every monsoon, the land used to be parched rest of the year. Not because there were no other sources of water but because the people had little wherewithal to tap it. The resident communities thus thought little of agriculture as livelihood and, instead, depended on forest produce.

How the fortunes changed
Abi Dandiya, father of gram rozgar sahayak Bansidhar Dandiya, says his fortunes have changed. Abi, who is growing chilli this season, enthusiastically shows the patch where the plants are heavy with the crop, a scarlet ripening. The field is broken up into small patches where one may grow one or many crops simultaneously. Each patch, curiously, has a small pit in one of its corners. “We use rainwater that collects in these ditches to irrigate our crop,” Abi explains.

That’s fine for the monsoons but what happens afterward? “The rest of the year we use ditches as a compost pit (for farm waste). There’s a stream on that side; we use its water,” he replies, pointing toward the other end of his field.

The ditches were dug, and his field levelled, under an MNREGS work order. Enthused by the first successes with agriculture, Abi has taken to it with a certain level of fervour. He now sees it as something that could become his family’s mainstay. In fact, he has taken it a few steps further: with a grant received under Rahtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana, Abi has put up a vermin-compost shed.

Whatever he can use, he will; he plans to sell the rest to neighbours who have also taken up agriculture.
With funding from the state horticulture department, Abi has also put up a nursery for vegetable saplings. “I will use the saplings for my own field and will consider selling later,” he replies when asked whether it is another venture with business in mind.

Abi says he made a handsome profit selling brinjals and peas recently. So his decision to see whether he can replicate it with other crops seems understandable. It is clear that Abi is channelling the entrepreneur in him these days. Realising that dry red chillies sell at better price than green chillies due to the vast difference in their shelf-lives, he has added value to his crop this time — he is drying them!
And he credits MNREGS for his fast-evolving role.

MNREGS: offering a gateway to holistic development
But it is not that the benefits of new MNREGS implementation in the district are contained to Abi and others who, like him, were in the path of direct gain. It is spilling over to the likes of Sugena Mallik, who has been working as a farmhand on Abi’s field for the last few cropping seasons. With very little land of his own, he needs the employment. His friend requested his services when he found he couldn’t manage the farm by himself.

Now, with year-round cropping on the farm, Sugena knows there wouldn’t be many lean days. “Bhai pakahare chasa kaama acchi ta mate paisa miliba (as long as my brother [friend] has work at his farm I’m assured of an income),” he says.

A few furlongs from the mouth of the cobbled path to the village lies a huge mango plantation on fields owned by different families. The land was levelled, the pits dug, sapling planted and bamboo guards were set up around each sapling. This, too, was part of MNREGS work order for Nadapatanga. It is an overwhelming realisation that all this is pretty new to the people here, and yet they see the full promise of it.

The new, innovative MNREGS implementation props the promise offered to Kandhamal. It offers a gateway to holistic development. Rules were tweaked, yes, to arrive at the present avatar — the district administration did away with work orders for individual projects, replacing it with work orders for entire panchayats — but the risks paid off. The effect has been encouraging — Nadapatanga has received Rs 34 lakh under MNREGS for a period of four years, which will see extensive convergence with natural resource management in the region.

However, it is not that this has come off unstuck. Annapurna Patra may be 62 years old but she’s still got the spunk of a younger person. “The projects are helping us. We used to just make roads (under MNREGS) but the payments are not cleared on time. How long can we work without pay?” she asks.
Bansidhar, who has been listening, says the villagers had complained to assistant engineer (in-charge of planning projects and deducing outlay) and were told that the pending amounts will be cleared once the next work cycle starts. But for the villagers it means further delay, as the harvest season is on and it is a period of intense work from reaping to threshing paddy.

There are leadership issues as well. The project is run aground every time a dedicated official is transferred, be it at the block or at the district level. In fact, the engineer who had assured Nadapatanga was transferred and it interfered with payment schedule, Bansidhar says.
“MNREGS here sails in fits and bursts but whenever it does, it goes a long distance in benefitting people,” says a keen watcher of the project unwilling to be named.

Whatever the din about MNREGS elsewhere may be, Nadapatanga and other villages in Kandhamal can’t help but acknowledge the extent to which it has changed their lives for the better. Some, like Chaman, may offer it grudgingly, thanks to the many issues that need working out, but they will never diss it.