National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) promises the largest ever employment programme in human history. Entitlements under NREGA are demand-driven and constitutionally protected. Even so there is a real danger that lack of awareness among intended beneficiaries and absence of implementation capability among Gram Panchayats (GPs, the chief implementing agency), will mean that the full potential of NREGA is not realised. To meet this challenge SPS set up the National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) for NREGA in 2007. The Consortium includes 42 partners across 33 districts in 9 states of India who are working to make NREGA a success. Our role is the technical and social empowerment of these partners.
The Consortium seeks to move beyond the more traditional civil society role of acting as a watchdog for NREGA. The idea is to actively participate in making NREGA effective and its implementation true to the spirit of the objectives of the Act. This, of course, incorporates the vigilance role but focuses on an integrated approach to planning, implementation and social audit of NREGA works. Our vision is that work done under NREGA would create the necessary water infrastructure on whose basis a whole range of nature-based livelihood opportunities could be created for the disadvantaged. Planning for this convergence needs also to be done co-terminus with NREGA work. We also believe that NREGA affords an unprecedented opportunity for governance reform at the grass roots. Even while recognising the great difficulties CSOs and PRIs have faced in working together, a key element of the Consortium’s strategy is to facilitate partnerships between grass-roots CSOs and PRIs, given the crucial role assigned to PRIs under NREGA.
SPS Core Team member Pramathesh Ambasta is National Coordinator of the NREGA Consortium
Training Material on NREGA
We are also working closely with the Government of India and a number of state governments on NREGA. At the request of the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), Government of India, SPS has prepared watershed works manuals in the NREGA context (300 pages+ in both English and Hindi). The Governments of Chhattisgarh and Bihar have decided to distribute our manual to all their Gram Panchayats and concerned officers. For the MoRD we have converted each of the 16 chapters of these manuals into stand-alone booklets. Design and typesetting of all SPS publications has been a labour of love of Pramathesh Ambasta over the last two decades.
We have also made 5 training films (in both Hindi and English) based on these manuals. One of the films “Earthen Dams” won the Magna Mater Award at the 25th International Agrofilm Festival in Slovakia in October 2008. This is the highest award given to the best film of the festival across all categories. In addition, the film “Earthen Dams” was also nominated in the competitive section of Eko Films (34th International Film Festival on the Environment and Natural and Cultural Heritage of the Czech Republic), the film “Ridge Area Treatment” was nominated in the competitive section of CineEco (14th International Environmental Film Festival, Portugal) and the film “On Farm Interventions” is nominated in the competitive section of upcoming Wildlife Vaasa 2008 (International Nature Film Festival, Finland). These films have been directed by Pinky Brahma Chaudhuri and Shobhit Jain who are both graduates from the Film and Television Institute of India.
SPS Core Team members Pinky Brahma Chaudhuri and Shobhit Jain lead the SPS Films Division.