The first eminent citizen report on NREGA has come down heavy on the Assam government for flawed implementation of the flagship welfare scheme in Kokrajhar district. Former Delhi develeopment authority (DDA) commissioner A K Jain has criticised the state government and the district administration for failing on several counts causing the scheme to fall short of its targets by miles.

The rural development ministry had appointed 61 eminent citizens (mostly retired civil servants) to assess NREGA implemenation across the country.

The chosen eminent citizens were to visit their adopted district from time to time and file an assessment report on the implementation of NREGA.

Jain's is the first of such assessments and definitely doesn't come as music for the northeastern state's babus.

Here are some excerpts, summarising the observations made in the report.

Awareness generation and information education communication

Except some sundry awareness generation workshops and training of PRI functionaries, there are no regular sustained awareness programmes for the scheme for the benefit of district officials and villagers. It is observed that most of the officials at the field level do not have an overview of their project and NREGA programme and usually carry out the schemes according to the orders from above. Some block officials do not even know the event of block area, number of villages, population, length of roads, number of schools, dispensaries etc in their jurisdiction. The decisions are ad hoc, based on political and other intervention

Work process, planning, projects and execution

No consolidated list is prepared and most officials have no idea about the number of completed/ ongoing projects in the overall district. Also there is hardly any integration of projects taken up in various adjacent blocks. There is no overall district development plan leading to ad hoc block wise shelf of projects with little integration coordination and convergence. The design and execution of projects vary from block to block and there are no standard operating procedure for supervision of worksite facilities, mode of payments, asset management and maintenance.

Wage payment

There are frequent complaints that the present wage is below market rate and there are delays in payment. The delay in payment of wages is mainly due to non availability of local bank and post office. This point towards a need to take the bank or post offices to villages/NREGA site.

Records

There is a lack of systematic maintenance of records at block level. According to the official there are difficulties in computerisation, MIS paperwork is too much. The shortage of IT skilled staff, interruption in power supply and non availability of hardware and software are some of the common problems.

Staff training and administrative set up

In general there is shortage of field staff and proposal for sanction of staff are pending for approval of the state government.

Monitoring

The monitoring of the project is done at the district, state, centre level. However there seems to be no detailed guideline and standard operating audit procedures except at the central level. The local officials expressed that there are many committees for monitoring, audit etc at various level which need to be streamlined and role of each should be defined to avoid overlaps too much, paperwork and also strengthen the local economy.

Social Audit

It appears that there is no established procedure and system for undertaking social audit.