Dialogues for Democracy, Lessons from Rajasthan

Context: Federalism and good governance need engagement between people and o?cials, as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) programme in Rajasthan shows.

Case study: Implementation of the MGNREGA in Rajasthan -

• Issues faced:
  • Overreliance on Technology: has led to payment rejections in many cases; There are numerous reason for rejections -
    • Errors made by block-level data entry operators in entering the account or Aadhaar details.
    • Banks consider accounts as ‘dormant’ when the accounts are not used for some time.
    • Rejection due to ‘Inactive Aadhar’: due to software flaws maintained by the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI).
  • Issues with accessing information :
    • Reasons for rejection are rarely provided: it is difficult to look into each payment, understand the reasons for rejection and help the workers accordingly.
    • Programme information continues to be inaccessible and, when available, some are in ill-defined formats.
• Steps taken: to resolve the issues -
  • A workshop was conducted: involving civil society organizations who interacted with the aggrieved workers, administrative officers from the village level to the State level, and bankers.
  • Issuance of detailed guidelines: With well-defined responsibility, clear timelines, and monitoring and protocols to be followed by officials.
  • Launched the Jan Soochna Portal (JSP): a single platform in the public domain providing information across 60 departments of over 104 schemes.
  • MGNREGA samvads: Institutionalized the dialogue between government and civil societies.
• Outcome: In a period of one year from the workshop, the Rajasthan government was able to clear ?380 crores worth of payments; Currently, only 2.7% of payments are pending regeneration.
• Learnings: Open communication channels, an eagerness to work with worker groups and a keen ear to the ground would help address the grievances of the workers.
  • Consultations at the initial stages of law-making along with a continuous dialogic exercise during the implementation process should be the norm for effective programme implementation.

Conclusion: As The American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson said, ‘Deliberation and debate is the way you stir the soul of our democracy’, a government committed to constitutional principles should heed to people’s views.