What ever money that is allotted to villages should be free fund and not the fund which is tied to one or the other scheme. There are so many schemes like old age pension, widow pension, Indra awas yojana and NRGA or many more. Villages do not need any scheme that the government moots because only a fraction of the money allotted in these schemes reach the people it is meant for. The villagers do not need these schemes but need free funds. If for the above funds lets say rupees five crore is sent to a village send only three crore but that three crore should be a free fund that can be utilized by the villagers as per their needs. The villagers in their gram Sabha should decide jointly as to how much money is needed for irrigation and how much for widow pension. How much money is to be spent on education and how much should be spent on health care. Let villagers/ gram Sabha be the decision makers.
The villagers will decide what is the criteria that categorises one below the poverty line (BPL) and? In Hong Kong a person without an Air Conditioner is treated as a person who is BPL. In Delhi a rickshaw puller is able to make rupees five thousand a month and yet is not able to make two ends meet. He is forced to live in shanties in dirty surroundings. But rupee five thousand is enough in a village where that same person can live decently.
The criteria, therefore, would be different for different state and geographical locations. Sitting in Delhi no uniform policies can be adopted. What is BPL in
Delhi is not BPL, for say in a place like Kalahandi
Leave this to the social set up of a village. Let them decide that who among them does not have a house and is in urgent need of the same. So he gets a house under such scheme. Under Indra Vikas Yojana the government makes funds available for two houses in a village, which in turn, with connivance of corrupt government employees, are given to people who do not need them.
Let the villagers decide who is without house and who is suffering from malnutrition. Let them decide what the need of their society is.
Let the people of gram Sabha allot funds to the hungry and funds for the homeless. Let the people of the Sabha decide how much money should be spent on education so that every child of the village can become literate. It would be the collective responsibility of the people to provide for its people funds that have come actually from the people’s tax money.
This would be an ideal way of democracy where the wealth of the people will recycle and grow.
In villages and town people raise loans from Loan Sharks at exorbitant rates of interest. When they want to start a small business or start farming then the
gram Sabha can disburse loan from the available funds to the needy at reasonable rates of interest. This is possible only if free fund is available to the gram sabhas and not fund that is tied to one scheme or the other.
Toady many a farmers are committing suicide in several villages of the country. These are the people who have been driven to take such measure because of economic reasons but if the gram sabhas have the funds available then such suicides will stop in the country. Many a times the harvested grain starts to rot due to untimely rain. The harvested grain is not stored in warehouse, which causes huge financial loss to the farmers. The farmers could have made warehouse only if they had funds available to them.
The government is hardly able to look at their crying need. There is a small village near Chennai by the name of Kutumbacum whose sarpanch is Ilango. He is the first chemical engineer who left his job fifteen years back and decided to become sarpanch of his village.
There are about thousand families in the village. It was estimated that people buy things of daily use to the tune of rupees fifty lac a month. These are things like soap, cooking oil, food stuff and others. Ilango believed that at least 80 percent things could be produced in the village itself. He got a lot of cottage industry started in the village itself that started to produce oil, food stuff for consumption and bricks for the houses.
If free fund is available to the villagers or the gram sabhas then all this can be achieved by all the villages that can spur the economy of the village and the country. This free fund available in the hands of people, not in the hands of corrupt and inept government employees, can help them put up small production units for things that the village needs most.
In many villages of a block near Pune a successful experiment is in progress. Earlier between June and September people used to face severe financial crises. During this period people used to run towards cities for employment or take loan from the money lender at exorbitant rates of 100-150%. If villagers took 100 kg of grain then to the money lenders they used to give back 150 kg. after four months. In spite of such a high rates of interest that was paid by the villagers they were still under the clutches of these loan sharks who would make these borrowers work for free in the fields of lender.
This hadadverse effect on the borrowers who used to get into a vicious cycle. For 100 kg grain that they bought, they paid back 150 kg., which is fifty percent higher. In other words they were unable to pay back this loan and went back to the same money lender again and again.
But in this block an organization started a Grain Bank. The people created an association and this association loaned grain to the members of the society according to the need of the members. Instead of returning 150 Kg. grain, now they had to return only 125 kg. grain only. In four years time the farmers have been able to repay the entire loan amount to this association. There is no fear of the money lender, no working free for him and freedom from the loan. Now, the villagers have surplus grain that is being stored by the association. This experiment is running successfully in about 150 villages in the neighborhood.
If the villagers could get free fund then similar grain banks could be started in all villages which could be free from hunger and the clutches of the loan sharks to write their own story of success.
All schemes of government should be stopped. These schemes get entangled into a complicated web of government officials on the village and state level, powerful bureaucrats and their political masters who are neither accountable to the people nor they could be prosecuted. Only 10 % of the money under these grand schemes reach the people rest is lost or embezzled in transit. “We the people” squirm and squeal helplessly and watch the drain of our own tax money without recourse to any one.
But if all schemes by the government are stopped and free fund made available to the gram sabhas or the people, then a revolution will come in the country that can erase poverty, hunger and unemployment.
No comments:
Post a Comment