Bihar job scheme fails to reach people

Patna -- Sukhdeo Paswan and Mahesh Manjhi, both landless labourers in a Bihar village, have been waiting for months to receive a job card, which would ensure employment under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) - a promise made by the state government.

A majority of the poor in Bihar, like Paswan and Manjhi, haven't received these cards though the scheme sponsored by the central government was launched almost 10 months ago.

"We have lost all hope," lamented Manjhi.

Hundreds of labourers demonstrated here Tuesday against the state government's failure to implement the scheme effectively.

"The scheme was not implemented in Bihar properly and very few people have been provided job cards," said Girija Satish, general secretary of the Rashtriya Lok Samiti. The scheme was launched in February.

"The government is bound to implement the scheme as it is mandatory," he said.

Satish said the Samiti had conducted a survey in nine of Bihar's 38 districts to ascertain if the benefits of the scheme had truly reached the people.

The nine districts included Samastipur, Muzaffarpur, Vaishali, Gaya, Nawada, Patna, West Champaran, Jehanabad and Arwal.

"We surveyed 1,890 families in 66 villages and found that 1,014 people had applied for job cards but only 240 had received them," Satish told IANS here. "It seems as if the government is not serious about the scheme."

Gaya District Magistrate told the survey team that job cards were made for about 97,000 people but could not be distributed due to lack of village level staff.

But S.M. Raju, additional secretary in the rural development department, said the scheme was being implemented across the state. "The government has issued approximately 2.2 million job cards."

According to a World Bank report, nearly 40 percent of Bihar's population lives below the poverty line and hundreds of thousands of poor people migrate to other states to earn a livelihood.

The job card scheme was expected to check the migration as it promises to ensure at least 100 days of work in a year.