MNREGS helped the Congress win in 2009 – or so thinks the party. But it is unlikely to be of much help next year. It has helped countless people in villages, and even LK Advani praised it at the UN, but it is plagued by poor design leading to corruption. And yet it has to be UPA’s calling card in 2014 for rural voters. So, the rural development ministry wants to reach out to people and tell them about the what good MGNREGS has been doing to them.

The ministry has formulated “a comprehensive information education and communication (IEC) strategy”, which “aims to create awareness among rural people and other stakeholders with special focus on MNREGS workers” about various aspects of the scheme, says a press release. The ‘strategy’ has already been launched.

Read the ministry paper on strategy here.

Moreover, the strategy aims at “facilitating dissemination of right-based provisions of the Act to ensure that the workers know their right to demand wage employment and exercise their right by applying for such employment as per their need”.

This will have to go beyond simple publicity through hoardings and melas. “The strategy also takes a detour from the conventional mass media driven approach in message dissemination, and focus on mid media and interpersonal media initiatives to ensure that the messages reach the target group in an effective and sustainable way.”

“Beyond raising awareness, interventions at interpersonal level have been provided to ensure that individuals convert their awareness into action. For this, social and behaviour change communication (SBCC) activities would be taken up by the states, at the grassroots level.” With “interpersonal interventions” and “behaviour change”, it sounds quite out of some dystopian science fiction, though.

Then, of course there is social media. “Advantages of social media websites will also be utilised and importance will be given on the branding of MGNREGA at the grass root level.”

To justify all this gobbledygook, the ministry has cited the CAG performance audit report on MNREGS of 2013 which, of course, had highlighted several irregularities but had also “commented on the lack of awareness among rural community about the scheme”.

“The CAG report further highlighted the absence of an IEC strategy in most of the states. Subsequently, the ministry has now requested all the states to prepare IEC annual action plans and quarterly deliverables for the FY 13-14 in respect of MNREGS.”

On a related point, the ministry is also looking to use the mass media – newspapers etc. – to deliver the right message to masses. For this, state- and district-level “orientation workshops” have been planned for journalists. The need for this was felt, notes a letter from the joint secretary of the ministry to all states, “in the context of certain news items which were reported as a result of less than adequate understanding of various programmatic aspects of MNREGS”.