The scarcity of water and livelihood have pushed households to Mumbai. (Representational photograph)
MUMBAI: For the second one time in final three years, farmhand Yashodabai Rathod, 38, migrated to Mumbai from the drought-hit Marathwada. She become no longer by myself. The shortage of water and livelihood had driven the complete own family out: Her husband, three daughters and 3 sons, brother-in-law and his spouse, and their 3 kids.
They had been some of the 350 families that left Mukhed and flocked to the transient migrant website of tarpaulin-and-bamboo houses in Mumbai suburb of Ghatkopar.
Yashodabai goes to discover work only when the family is short of money. She earns Rs three hundred($4.50) an afternoon — generally as an unskilled employee at production sites.
Her prolonged family owns around 2 acres of land of their village. there may be no irrigation, properly or borewell, so they might plant no iciness crop after the rains failed closing year.
in the course of the four monsoon months of 2014, they labored as farm labourers in her village of Nevli,finding paintings thrice every week. girls earned Rs one hundred an afternoon, the guys Rs 200.standard, the circle of relatives earned Rs 20,000 — now not enough to get by using.
In 2015, 5 of the family broke boulders and built temporary roads, operating 30 days beneath the arena’slargest make-paintings plan — the Mahatma Gandhi countrywide Rural Employment assure Act. None of them were paid.
it’s miles in conditions of distress like these that the MGNREGA — which the sector financial institutionin 2013 called a “stellar” example of rural improvement — became supposed to provide an alternative to migration. That they needed to travel six hundred km by way of bus searching for a livelihood, showshow the programme got here up brief.
The programme, which ensures 100 days of labor to every family each yr, failed them in a year of reportdrought.
“MGNREGA works have been in complete swing in the complete district until 2011-12,” stated Kalpana Kshirsagar, deputy leader govt officer of Nanded District Council. “The activity has subsided in the closingthree years, specially in Mukhed taluk,” she stated, where Yashodabai’s village is positioned.
Expenditure on wages and the wide variety of man or woman-days employed declined gradually between2012-13 and 2015-16. most effective Rs 26 lakh has been spent on wages this financial 12 months on 782employees — compared to Rs 25 crore on 45,800 employees in 2012-13.
local BJP lawmaker Tushar Rathod said the information did no longer reflect truth.
“On paper, from 2009 to 2014, lots of works below MGNREGA had been undertaken in our taluka,” hestated. “In truth, lots of those had been carried out the usage of machines, and employment registershave been falsely filled with names of labourers. money was laundered, people did no longer realize their names have been used, no person were given paid, and works of inferior satisfactory had been finished.”
After news of the scandal broke, the district Justice of the Peace initiated crook motion in almost 23 villages. round two hundred accused have been named, such as the sarpanch (elected village head) and the village administrative officer, who fled.
Mr Rathod said the subsequent “panic state of affairs”, when no village panchayat dared to initiateMGNREGA works, turned into the “key motive for the steep fall in jobs created and money spent on thescheme”.
but he admitted that had MGNREGA worked because it ought to, there could were no migration.
Yashodabai agreed that it became nearby level corruption that had hobbled the challenge.
The agent who supervised MGNREGA in her village did no longer pay them, announcing he had notobtained any from the authorities.
“The works manager changed into the son of a police officer. His family controls a effective administrativesubmit inside the village. there was not anything we could do,” she said.
