People working under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in West Bengal have not been paid their wages for more than a year now with the Union government stopping the payment of funds. Bengal is the only state impacted by this stoppage.
MGNREGA is a national social security scheme meant to guarantee at least 100 days of unskilled manual work in a year.
The non payment of wages by the Centre is being seen as an outcome of the bitter tussle between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Trinamool Congress ahead of the local body elections in the state later this year. The result of MGNREGA stoppage has been a rise in food insecurity and women’s unemployment, point out experts.
A year without a safety net
The last wage instalment to workers in the state was disbursed on December 26, 2021, according to NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, a rights group for MGNREGA workers. The Union government has since withheld the release of more than Rs 7,500 crore worth of MGNREGA funds to West Bengal, the rights group said. Of this, the workers’ pending wages amount to Rs 2,744 crore.
Nikhil Dey, founding member of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, a civil rights group, suggests more than 1 crore workers have been affected.
The Union government has cited alleged corruption at the state government level and invoked Section 27 of the act to block the disbursement of funds. The law allows the Union government to stop the funding and investigate alleged improper usage of funds meant for MGNREGA if it receives complaints.
A political tug o’ war
Behind these allegations of corruption lie a bitter political tussle between the state’s two main parties as they gear up for panchayat elections later this year. Both the BJP and the state’s ruling Trinamool Congress are blaming each other for the stalemate over MGNREGA wage payments. The state BJP has played up allegations of corruption and misuse of MGNREGA funds by the Trinamool Congress’ state government to claim that the blocking of funding by the BJP-led Union government is justified. Dilip Ghosh, a key BJP leader from West Bengal, said the Union government “is ready to release funds for the people of the state. But first, the state government has to explain the expenditures from already released funds.”
“The people of the state know how TMC leaders and workers misused the central funds,” Ghosh said. “They even changed names of the Centre’s schemes and passed them as their own. Under such circumstances, the Centre stopped the funds to put an end to the corruption.”
On the other hand, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on January 2 that she had raised the MGNREGA dues matter with Union ministers after having previously written to the prime minister thrice.
In November too, Banerjee had said it was the state’s right to access the funds. “I personally met the prime minister and spoke to him in the matter,” Banerjee said in November. “Will I have to touch his feet now? The Union government will have to pay our dues at any cost. Else the positions of power have to be vacated.”
Trinamool Congress leader and Lok Sabha member Abhishek Banerjee has accused the BJP of “wilfully depriving” the people of West Bengal for “rejecting them”, referring to the saffron party’s defeat at the hands of his party in the 2021 assembly election. The state is owed Rs 5,433 crore – “more than 50% of total dues owed to states,” Banerjee highlighted in a tweet, citing the Union government’s response to his questions in Parliament.
Workers are suffering
Rights groups criticise the fact that the right to work scheme is being held hostage to partisan politics. NREGA Sangharsh Morcha said in a statement that “while the state asserts that all corrective measures have been taken, BJP at the Centre is however reluctant to release the money before the Panchayat elections”.
“In this slugfest the sufferers are the workers who have been deprived of their wages for the past year,” the organisation said.
Wrong in law and logic
Moreover, experts argue that the Union government stopping NREGA payments has little backing in law. “It (Section 27 of the Act) does not allow the Centre to do a post-facto stoppage of wage payments,” Dey pointed out.
Similarly, NREGA Sangharsh Morcha said in a statement that provisions of Section 27 “cannot be read as a licence to stop wage payments to workers who have already worked” and that the “workers have an unconditional right to be paid within 15 days”.
Moreover, the Union government’s actions of stopping wages in response to the state government’s alleged corruption make little sense, given that it ends up punishing workers for the alleged wrongdoings of bureaucrats. “You can investigate corruption at the government level, but you cannot not pay someone who has already worked,” Dey told Scroll.in. “Workers are the real victims of corruption anyway. You are now destroying them.”
Similarly, Anuradha Talwar from the Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity said that “not paying workers for the work they have done is like bonded labour, no matter what corruption has happened. The workers are being punished.”
“They (the Union government) are practically saying that all work done in the past year is corrupt, which is not possible,” Talwar added.
As a result, the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha has demanded immediate release of all pending MGNREGA wages in West Bengal along with compensation for the delay as per the Act’s provisions. According to the law, if their wages are not paid within 15 days, workers are entitled to compensation at the rate of 0.05% of the unpaid wages per day for the duration of the delay.
Food insecurity
Non-payment of MGNREGA wages to workers in West Bengal is having an adverse impact on the ground, especially in terms of food security and rural unemployment, rights groups suggest.
Apurva Gupta from the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, who was part of the activists and journalists’ fact-finding team that examined the situation in three districts of West Bengal in July, highlighted how many workers in districts like Purulia were dependent on MGNREGA for their livelihood. On an average, these workers are owed Rs 3,000 to Rs 6,000, Gupta said.
But because of the non-payment of these wages, workers have been skipping meals, Gupta told Scroll.in. “Even if they are having one meal a day, it usually comprises rice and water,” she said. “The children are dependent on the midday meals provided in schools.”
Talwar and Gupta suggest there has been at least one death linked to starvation in West Bengal’s Jhargram district because the person was unable to get a new MGNREGA job card as the scheme has come to a standstill in the state.
Women’s unemployment
Dey also highlighted that along with having a “drastic impact on food security”, the non-payment of MGNREGA wages has also led to an increase in women’s unemployment.
“MGNREGA wages are a major source of income, especially for women as they do not have any alternate livelihood,” Talwar explained. While the men can migrate for work, the women are the worst affected because they are unable to migrate because of family, Talwar told Scroll.in.
The Centre’s stoppage of funds, resulting in non-payment of wages, has been challenged in the Calcutta High Court by the Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity. The chief justice has asked the Union and the state governments to file affidavits in the matter, which will be heard next on January 9.
Also read: Centre owes over Rs 8,305 crore to states, Union Territories under MGNREGA, shows data