Bihar villagers burn job cards

PATNA - Angry unemployed residents of a village in Bihar’s Vaishali district burnt their job cards provided under the central government’s flagship employment programme to protest the failure of authorities to give them work.

A group of nearly four dozen unemployed people of Chandi village in Vaishali, about 40 km from here, burnt their job cards Sunday to protest against the authorities for not providing them jobs under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).

“We were forced to burnt job cards after we were not provided work under NREGS for over the last three years,” said Sanjeev Kumar, a villager.

Another villager Mahendra Prasad said that job card holders were not provided work despite repeated requests to local officials. District officials said that job cards were distributed to 400,000 unemployed poor in Vaishali. But only around a fourth of them have been provided work under MGNREGS till date.

Early this year, the state government also admitted that the government had managed to provide on an average only 25-30 days of work to job card holders against the stipulated 100 days in a year.

According to official sources, MGNREGS has not done well in the state despite the government’s efforts to give benefits to the poorest of the poor in rural areas.

Till date the state government has not paid any unemployment compensation to job card holders though it is prescribed in the job scheme.

Any job card holder can claim unemployment allowance in case he or she is not provided work within 15 days from the date of application.

Congress MP and party general secretary Rahul Gandhi, during his visit to Bihar last week, said that the scheme has not been properly implemented in the state. He said that the Nitish Kumar-led government had failed to implement the scheme and alleged that 20 percent of the scheme’s money had been siphoned off by middlemen.

Last month, state Rural Development Minister Bhagwan Singh Kushwaha said the central government has released only 20 percent of the funds meant for schemes under MGNREGS in Bihar till Jan 25 this year. He added that the state government has requested for over Rs.1,700 crore under the scheme.