HUL's 42-crore initiative breathing life into public works under MGNREGA

The elders of Pimparkhed in the punishingly dry Marathwada region of Maharashtra remember the severe drought of 1972; it was then that the village had seen water conservation work of some significance being undertaken. Over four decades later nothing has changed; this village of 1,000 residents continue to rely on tankers for its water needs. And Marathwada has turned into an epicentre of farmer suicides in the country; over 200 suicides this year alone.
The agrarian crisis is of serious proportions but right now the quest is for survival. “We have to earn. We need jobs now,” says Yasmin Kamble. “In the long term, yes, we want water security and better farming.” In the drought-prone drylands, jobs are indeed scarce.

Nearly 75% of the families in Jalna district’s Pimparkhed, therefore, migrate to labour on the irrigated sugarcane fields of western Maharashtra. After the harvest season, they return home to despair and nothingness. That’s changing now.

For the first time, chunks of job-seekers are finding jobs right in their villages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) through an innovative public private-civil society partnership driven by Hindustan Unilever (HUL). The Act, passed in 2005, guarantees at least 100 days of work per year to each household on local public works. Yet, large swathes of villages have remained peripheral under the NREGA for various reasons.

It’s indeed rare for a large corporate entity to directly engage on NREGA although a few like ITC have had brushes with the scheme. Now, the HUL pilot is beginning to interest large corporations. The engineering giant L&T and also banks like HDFC and HSBC are watching with keen interest. It’s a good augury.

HUL, in a way, was pulled into the iconic jobs scheme through its laser-sharp focus on water conservation undertaken through the Hindustan Unilever Foundation (HUF) along with its NGO partners over the past five years. It has already created a cumulative water potential of a 100 billion litres across India. In the near future, water works under the NREGA may be a significant contributor to its conservation target of 500 billion litres by 2020.

The NREGA partnership in Jalna appears to be a neat fit; with the government extending wages for soil and water conservation work and HUF with Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), its NGO partner, extending all technical and managerial inputs to the programme.

Given the way the year-old partnership is progressing, it can silence critics who dub the NREGA as wasteful for its inability to build durable assets. The `42-crore partnership project (see box), spread over 76 villages, is so precise in its projections that it even spells out the eventual increase in agricultural yields (9,700 tonnes) by 2019.

“The ultimate goal is to foster climateresilient agriculture and build adaptive capacities of farmers,” says Sambhaji Palve, programme coordinator, HUF. Tapping into the NREGA serves multiple purposes: it extends the immediate salve of wages to distressed villagers; it helps build durable water assets leading to sustainable agriculture and fosters community ownership as villagers formulate water plans for themselves and also work on it.

HUF is just about wetting its feet in the NREGA waters, and expectedly, it is infusing corporate rigour into the process. It has emboldened weak village panchayats to draw work plans that can provide jobs to over 200 people at one go. NL Kakade, the gram sevak of Lonar-Bhaygaon, a village of 3,500 people concedes that, all these years, his village just didn’t have the capacity to handle works beyond the usual toilet blocks that can at best provide jobs to four or five people under the NREGA.

“We also bring in the focus of a for-profit; in terms of metrics, measurement, and impact,” says Sanjiv Mehta, MD & CEO, HUL. “We ensure a multiplier effect.” It is significant that the corporate booster shot to NREGA, which provides employment to around 5 crore households on an average every year, which is one-fourth of rural households in India, is coming at a time when the scheme is beginning to suffocate. The number of person-days of work has seen a drop of almost 50% in five years: 284 crore in 2009-10 to 155 crore in 2014-15. Central government expenditure on the scheme has seen a fall of 30% over four years.

It is often construed that the government provides work to those who demand them, as dictated by the law, but the fact is that large swathes of villages remain unseen on the NREGA map primarily because the panchayat and the block-level hierarchies simply lack the capacity to plan, formulate and execute public works that can absorb large numbers of job seekers. Unmet demand is a grim reality.

The World Bank’s India Development Update for April 2015, citing the National Sample Survey data of 2009-10, highlights the extent of unmet demand; ‘around 46% of households report one or more members of their household would have liked to work on the scheme; only 25% secured any work over the course of the year.’

The HUF-WOTR engagement is beginning to reverse this trend. Harish Daware of WOTR reveals that, over the past few months, in the Ambad block of Jalna, over 2,500 people work on NREGA sites on any given day. “Water conservation works, which deploy 200 to 300 people in a single village are now common,” he says.

Vithal Pagire, sarpanch of Pagirwadi, a village of 950 people, is elated at the turn of events since the past few months. He strides purposefully through a four-acre field where 160 workers are engaged in digging field bunds. “It’s the first public work undertaken in my village,” he says.

Panchayat capacities are evidently being shored up. There is a lot of hand-holding in monitoring, measuring and recording of work done as Santosh Pagire, the Gram Rojgar Sahayak (employment guarantee assistant employed under the NREGA) is assisted by village-specific WOTR employees called Vasundhara sevaks.

Most of the villages under the HUFWOTR ambit have already gone through an elaborate process; starting with awareness generation on water conservation through street plays, folk songs and also visits to Hiware Bazaar, a model village in neighbouring Ahmednagar district that has fought drought through planned water conservation and irrigation programmes. Baseline data on households is generated, including wealth rankings.

A vulnerability score of the village is also drawn, based on the five capitals: natural, human, social, material, and financial. “Farmer suicides happen in villages where social capital is very low,” explains Daware. Simultaneously, a mapping is done to understand the topography and the interplay of various components of the hydrological system: ground water, surface water and catchments, rainfall intensity and patterns, estimates of run-offs and various other environmental resources.

The study goes beyond village clusters. This is the reason why fields of some relatively well-off farmers — like MB Jamdare’s 11-acre land holding in Pagirwadi — are included in the NREGA works. “It falls in a contiguous stretch in our ‘ridge to valley’ approach of water conservation,” explains Pavale.

Once the water condition improves, Jamdare hopes to plant soya and cotton. The NREGA doesn’t provide funds for geo-hydrological investigations, a prerequisite to water conservation plans.

This is where the involvement of funding and technical partners like HUF-WOTR turns the scheme into a more meaningful programme. All these elaborate exercises enhance knowledge levels and improve practices but the goal is also to infuse a sense of ownership over the water assets amongst villagers. “Water and its governance are key to our interventions,” explains Ravi Puranik, CEO, HUF.

The foundation is also working on rejuvenating the commons — shared resources such as pastures, forests and water bodies — and linking it up with NREGA in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh with another partner, the Gujarat-based Foundation for Ecological Security.

Engaging with the government in a complex programme like the NREGA does come with a whole set of challenges; an insensitive bureaucracy, especially at the block levels, political interference, and corruption. Partners often have to start with, first; altering mind-sets and, second; building capacities, even before execution of projects starts. All of this requires considerable patience, time and resources.

The governmental system, however, has been receptive to the HUF-WOTR intervention. PT Kendre, deputy CEO of the Jalna Zilla Parishad, concedes the technical expertise the partnership brings to the table has enabled them to undertake public works they never thought they could accomplish. All these years, NREGA works in Jalna often translated into digging of wells, thousands of them, which eventually dry up. Little thought was given to the fundamentals; water harvesting or groundwater recharging. Kendre is now convinced; this indiscriminate, mindless digging of wells has to stop.