Rina Beypi, 25,
has just breastfed her baby and is trying to find a comfortable spot
by the roadside to rest her. She has to resume her work of carrying
stone dust on the head to the worksite where the renovation of a village
road is in progress.
Rina is happy with
her job card and the work she has got under the National Rural Employment
Guarantee Act (NREGA). At least she is getting daily wages, though not
on a regular basis. But she faces the nagging question of where to rest
her baby while she is working. “It is so hot outside. It’s
not easy to find a tree that can act as a shade all the time. My husband
also has to go for work and there is nobody at home to take care of
the baby,” she says. She doesn’t want to miss work either.
She desperately needs the money.
Her job card is
very important to Rina. She's been staying at a relief camp that has
been turned into a ‘model village’ at Langcholiet in Assam's
Karbi Anglong district. She is one of the many victims of the horrific
ethnic strife that rocked the district in 2003 and 2004. Thousands of
civilians were displaced in the district following a series of incidents
of ethnic violence over two separate but overlapping conflicts. One
was between the two militant groups, the United Peoples' Democratic
Solidarity (UPDS) and the Kuki Revolutionary Army (KRA), and the other
between the UPDS and the Khasi-Pnar people. In March 2004, following
retaliatory attacks, more than 2,000 Karbis fled their homes to live
in government-run relief camps.
The worst incident
was the macabre killing of 23 bus passengers belonging to the Karbi
community in October 2005. The passengers were burnt alive by an as-yet
unidentified armed group. Barring a few militants, those who were killed
or who lost their homes and belongings were unarmed civilians who had
nothing to do with the rivalry between the two warring militant outfits,
the Karbi Anglong-based UPDS fighting for the rights of Karbis, and
the Dima Halam Daogah (DHD) of the neighbouring North Cachar Hills claiming
to represent the Dimasas.
What followed next
was a blame game between the two outfits, each accusing the other of
wrongdoing. Political parties joined in and traded charges. The state
government ordered a judicial probe and asked for a Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI) inquiry. But the victimisation of common people
by the two groups left a schism between the two communities. The mistrust
and the psychological wounds the strife left in its wake will take a
long time to heal.
Rina’s co-worker
and fellow inmate at the relief camp, 35-year-old Katang Khangchupi,
belongs to Ramsing Hanse village of the Lumbajong Development Block.
She shudders as she recalls the day she and her family of five daughters
and one son, along with other people from her village, had to flee their
homes and take shelter at the Langcholiet Railway station. She still
fears going back to her village and has settled down in the Langcholiet
relief camp. Katang too has a job card under the NREGA.
Those living in
the relief camp, especially women and children, are struggling to recover
from the scars left by the violence in their native place. They have
little option other than to work in inhospitable conditions. Whenever
Katang goes out to work she faces the problem of whom to leave her one-year-old
daughter with.
The NREGA has been
in place in Assam for over a year now. The Act guarantees 100 days of
employment in a financial year to every adult member of a rural household
willing to do unskilled manual work. The Act, launched in February 2006,
is in force in altogether 200 districts of the country. Even if a person
is already employed/ engaged in work, he or she has the right to demand
employment as an unskilled manual worker under the Act. As per the provisions
of the Act, women are to be given priority and one-third of the beneficiaries
under the programme are to be women.
The Act also provides
for facilities for safe drinking water, shade for children, periods
of rest and a first-aid box at the work site (Section 27, Schedule II).
But a lot has to be done to ensure these facilities, and their absence
is glaring across all states. An inspection of the worksites in Karbi
Anglong district reveals a complete lack of such facilities. Small children
remain unattended in the heat. As a consequence, women are hesitant
to bring their children to the sites. It also forces them to rethink
applying for NREGA work in the first place. Trees act as the only source
of shade for the people working at the sites.
Sika Hansipi, 35,
of Monsing Engti village at Lumbajong Development Block, is another
victim of the ethnic strife and stays at the relief camp. She is bitter
when she describes how women have to carry their children at their back
when they go to work. “It is a pitiable sight to see pregnant
women working in the heat. And most of the time the mothers of infants
keep their babies along the roadside and have to leave their work at
regular intervals to feed the baby.”
The Karbi Nimso
Chingthur Asong (KNCA), a women’s organization in the state, has
time and again expressed its concern on the issue. Kajek Tokbipi, the
president of the organization, says, “We had inspected several
such sites and found that there are no medical facilities or shades
for women and their children. The worst bit was that the ignorant villagers
are not even aware that they are entitled to such privileges.”
The ‘privileges’
that the poor villagers can demand are safe drinking water, shade for
children, periods of rest and a first-aid box in place with adequate
material for emergency treatment of minor injuries and other health
hazards. Any labourer who gets injured while working at the NREGA site
has an entitlement to free medical treatment provided by the state government.
In case of hospitalisation of the injured worker, the state government
is required to provide complete treatment, medicines and hospital accommodation
to the worker free of charge, and the worker will be entitled to a daily
allowance that shall not be less than 50 percent of the applicable wage
rate. In case of death or permanent disablility due to an accident related
to NREGA work, an ex-gratia payment of Rs 25, 000 or such amount as
may be notified by the Central government shall be paid to the legal
heir of the deceased or to the disabled, as the case may be.
But despite these
problems, the NREGA is being hailed in the district as a landmark Act
because it establishes ‘the right to employment’. Amiya
Sharma, Executive Director of the Rashtriya Gramin Vikas Nidhi (RGVN)
at Guwahati, terms the NREGA “a wonderful scheme that ensures
localised labour for localised work” and says, “Nobody from
outside wants to go to these underdeveloped areas and it’s difficult
for the local people to migrate to other places in search of work. Of
course, a strong monitoring mechanism is needed to ensure its just implementation
but at least the provisions are there. These people would otherwise
have been nowhere.”
The RGVN has a ‘Gender
Budget and Analysis Centre’ that is focused on issues related
to gender in the NREGA’s working. According to the Centre the
need of the hour is generating awareness about the provisions of the
Act among local people, NGOs and other stakeholders. For women like
Rina, however, the prospect of having in place facilities and benefits
entitled to them under the NREGA still seems a far cry.
