The forgotten history of a job scheme, much before NREGS, Pg10

Key Highlights:

• The Bara Imambara in Lucknow, constructed in the 1780s during a famine under Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula, served as an early example of public works for famine relief.
• Vitthal Sakharam Page, a Gandhian public figure, initiated an employment scheme in Tasgaon in the mid-1960s that evolved into the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) in Maharashtra in 1969.
• The EGS in Maharashtra demonstrated that an open-ended employment guarantee was administratively feasible and fiscally manageable, even in a drought-prone economy.
• In 1978, Maharashtra enacted the Employment Guarantee Act, recognizing employment as a public obligation.
• The MGNREGS, enacted in 2005, nationalized the Maharashtrian idea of EGS, providing a job guarantee as a form of unemployment insurance.

Detailed Insights:

• The construction of the Bara Imambara highlights the historical understanding that the state must provide work, not alms, during times of distress.
• Page's experiment in Tasgaon involved providing work at below-market wages to ensure that people sought public works only when no alternative employment was available.
• The EGS paid equal wages to women and men for works like land leveling, digging wells, percolation tanks, and soil conservation, leading to reduced distress migration and the creation of local assets.
• Indira Gandhi initially denied central assistance to Maharashtra for famine relief, leading Page to propose financing rural employment through a dedicated tax on urban salaried workers, resulting in the profession tax earmarked for the EGS.
• The EGS set a wage floor, reducing labor's dependence on landlords and altering local power relations, but generated only a small fraction of total rural employment.
• The MGNREGS is a proxy for genuine unemployment insurance, rooted in the historical experience of famine works and the constitutional directive of the state as an employer of last resort.

Key Concepts Involved:

• MGNREGS: A national level program implemented to guarantee the right to work.
• EGS: A state-level program in Maharashtra guaranteeing employment.
• Social Protection: Measures to provide economic security to citizens.