Mr. Debiprasad Jena, Supervisor of the Soil Conservation Department (Machhkund) allegedly misappropriated INR 49,490 (USD 1000) from 16 workers under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which aims at ensuring the right to work and food security of all in India. After pressure by the victims and human rights groups, Mr. Jena on 10 March, paid INR 36,850 (USD 810) only, furthermore no punishment was imposed upon him for his blatant act of corruption.
All of victims are illiterate landless labourers and can be classified among the most vulnerable to food insecurity in India. The Hunger Alert for this case is here.
India has managed to weave a solid net of public food security programmes that addresses the specific needs of different vulnerable categories of the population. Its Supreme Court has adopted a very dynamic approach to the economic and social rights of the people and in a certain number of landmark interim orders has given clear instructions to the States to guide them in the proper implementation of those public schemes. Therefore, on paper, India has all the tools to guarantee the food security of all.
However, in practice, as is seen in the case, rampant corruption and default of governance and transparency have seriously hampered the functioning of these programmes and undoubtedly weakened their impact on the food security of the poor. With 38% of its population belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, i.e. very vulnerable to poverty and malnutrition, and the dubious distinction of having the highest percentage of population living below the poverty line (47.15% officially but more than 60% in reality) among the States, Orissa is unfortunately a case in point.
Corruption in Orissa ranges from bribes to general and systematic deductions, diverting essential resources from the public programmes and thus directly or indirectly jeopardizing the realization of the right to food of the poorest households. Transparency International and the Center for Media Studies recently estimated the level of corruption in the State as high, in a 2007 Corruption Study focusing on the BPL households.
Under the NREGS, every household willing to do manual work for minimal wage is entitled to 100 days of employment per year. Its implementation has been internationally welcomed as a big step toward the realization of the right to work of all, an essential component of their right to food. Nevertheless, it has been found by a FIAN Parallel Report (2008) that barely 3.2% of the registered households could avail 100 days of employment. The 2007 Corruption Study found out that 15% of the Below the Poverty Line (BPL) households in India had to use a contact or to pay bribes to access the NREGS. In total INR 70 million (USD 1.54 million) were spent as bribes by BPL households to access the scheme. Worrying impact of this extent of corruption: 4% of them could not access the service because they could not afford the bribes.
The attribution of a BPL Card that formally entitles the poorest of the poor to a large number of benefits plays a crucial role in securing their right to health and right to food. The design of the BPL list in Orissa has been crippled with corruption at all the levels of the government. The head of the Orissa Chapter of Transparency International admitted that 30 percent of the BPL families do not have a BPL card because they cannot afford to bribe officials to procure the card. In a previous hunger alert, the AHRC has denounced the corruption of the system in which officials resort to their influential position to be granted a BPL card. As the BPL card system is submitted to quotas, this corruption result in excluding poor household from its entitlements.
The victims are often left without legal remedies to these abuses, either because no independent legal redress procedures are available to them or, sometimes, simply because are unaware of their existence and mode of functioning. The 2007 Corruption Study found out that only 3.8% of the BPL households in Orissa were aware of their rights under the Right to Information Act, which mandates the public authorities to answer to the information request of the citizens within 30 days. It is a key component of the transparency of the public systems. Therefore, corruption remains the main obstacle blocking the villagers participation in the realisation of their right to food.
The Second Administrative Reform Commission of India acknowledged that The grievance redressal machinery should reach out to the people in order to redress the grievances as the poor workers who are denied their rights may not be easily forthcoming in complaining against established authorities. Concrete measures have been taken to increase the accountability of the public food security programmes such as the obligation to hold social audits for each project launched under the NREGA.
Nevertheless, the villagers are often unaware of this obligation and in some cases social audits have been held without the villagers participation and used to cover up a case of corruption. Actually, the 2007 Corruption Study discovered that a higher percentage of households thought that grievance redressal mechanisms for the malfunctioning of the PDS or the NREGA had deteriorated rather than improved over the previous year.
The access to those legal procedures is simply denied to them because of discrimination or, as a further effect of corruption: indeed, according to a 2005 survey by Transparency International, the judiciary in Orissa ranks among the top four corrupt in the country. An interim field report by the right to food campaign India concluded that the NREGA was particularly vulnerable to corruption partly because of the lack of distinction between the grievance redressal authorities and the implementing authorities.
The consequences of this exclusion from legal grievance redressal procedures were dramatically felt last year in a village of Balangir district in which five persons from the same family died of hunger and malnutrition. Field reports showed that some benefits never reached the entitled households in the village, in spite of the villagers repeated complaints in this respect.
Strong lip-service paid by high-ranking government official and punctual measures such as the establishment of internet-based grievance procedures for instance will be useless if the government refuses to acknowledge the cases of right to food violations brought to its attention. This denial only contributes in hampering the transparency and the accountability of the public distribution system and thus creates an environment favourable to the development of corruption.
Of course, as often in those cases, all the citizens of India are not equal in front of the consequences of the corruption of the public distribution programs. The most vulnerable and isolated groups of the population, the scheduled tribes and castes, bear the heaviest fruits of the diversion of resources from the food security programs. Corrupt civil servants often benefit from the discrimination against Dalit or tribal communities to demand bribes in exchange of a civil service. When the tribal or Dalit victims search redress against those practices, discrimination further creates violence faced by the victims to gain legal remedies to the deprivation of their rights. This violence can go as further as the murder of those who complained as reflected in the Narayanpatna case.
The link between corruption and human rights has been asserted several times by established international authorities. As early as 1996, the Declaration of the World Food Summit expressly mentioned corruption as being one of the causes of food insecurity. Similarly, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food has mentioned in 2001 corruption as one of the seven major economic obstacles that hinder or prevent the realization of the right and stipulated that fighting corruption was one of the obligations of the State under its duty to guarantee the food security of all. The Supreme Court of India has reasserted in several interim orders the imperious necessity to fight against corruption in order to fulfil the right to food of all.
It is now time to draw the consequences of those assertions. The United Nations Convention Against corruption mandates the governments to take proper steps to criminalize corruption. In order to effectively deter this practice, both the Orissa and the Central government must take concrete measure to ensure the efficiency of the grievance redressal procedures. This implies raising the awareness of the poor and isolated communities toward their existence. It also implies not turning a blind eye on the cases of corruption brought to their attention and in systematically granting compensation for the victims and punishment for the perpetrators and those involved in covering up their misbehaviour.
There is a saying in Orissa that summarizes the banality of corruption in the state perfectly, If you will go by branches, the corruption will go by leaves
