Ten days of work in 91 days: the 150-day promise meets the muster roll

Ninety-one days after the Tamil Nadu government launched its Vetri 150 rural employment scheme with a promise of 150 days of work, the average rural worker in the state has received ten.

Workers say employment under the VB-G RAM G scheme, which began on July 1, has arrived once every four or five weeks, with most people receiving just five or six days of work in total. Officials have also cut the number of workers taken at each worksite from 50 to 20, narrowing the door further for a workforce of nearly 80 lakh active workers.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. If the present trend continues, a department source conceded, workers may end the year with fewer than 30 days of employment, a fraction of the promised 150 days. "I have been waiting for work under the scheme for the last four weeks," said Meena of Peruthur village in Prathamaramapuram panchayat, Nagapattinam district. She is not an exception. Across the state's 12,480-odd panchayats, the pattern repeats, Kallakurichi being a partial exception where works have been generated at a higher rate. In 43 panchayats, no work was generated at all.

Where work has come, wages have not always followed. Workers in several panchayats say they have not been paid for three to four weeks. CPM state secretary P Shanmugam flagged the case of Abiramapuram village near Madurantakam, where wages have been pending for four weeks. An official of the rural development and panchayat raj department said the wages would be paid soon, and described the shortfalls as teething problems in a scheme revamped under a new set of rules.

The state moved only when workers threatened to move first. CPI(ML) functionary C Mathivanan said his party announced a protest on September 30 demanding work under the scheme. After the announcement, officials generated man-days for around 100 workers in Kachaikattu and Viralipatti panchayats in Vadipatti block of Madurai district. Before that, he said, work had been provided to only two or three people, in villages where many households depend on this scheme for their livelihood.

A senior official said more than 12 lakh man-days were generated across the state on a single recent Monday, and that the number would gradually rise to the state's average of 50 man-days per household by the end of the financial year. Even that official target, it is worth noting, is one third of what was promised. Fifty is not 150, and ten, which is what workers actually have after three months, is not a welfare state. It is a queue.

For the TVK government, which built its appeal on the language of victory and delivery, the rural worksite is becoming an awkward audit. A guarantee is judged not at the launch ceremony but in the fourth week of waiting, in the unpaid wage, and in the protest that had to be announced before the muster roll opened. Workers in Nagapattinam, Madurai and Madurantakam are not asking for novelty. They are asking for the days they were promised.