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Nation
Calcutta
Bengal States fail on dole for jobless
Opinion - Unemployment allowance to handful
International OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
Business
New Delhi, Sept. 27: Only eight states have given the
Sports
mandatory unemployment allowance to workers
Entertainment registered under the rural employment scheme over
Sudoku the past four years and even that for just a fraction of the
Crossword time they went jobless.
Jumble
Gallery The problem adds to the list of complaints about the
Congress-led UPA’s showpiece welfare programme. It
Horse Racing
has come to light in statistics collated by the Union
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rural development ministry, which runs the scheme.
WEEKLY FEATURES
According to the National Rural Employment Guarantee
Knowhow
Act, if employment is not provided to a registered
Jobs worker within 15 days of the receipt of the job
Telekids application, the government must pay the daily
Careergraph unemployment allowance.
Personal TT
The allowance is fixed by states, but it should not be
7days
less than a fourth of the wage for the first 30 days of
Graphiti
unemployment and half of the sum beyond it.
CITY NEWSLINES
Left-ruled Kerala and Bengal are among the few states
Choose Region that have paid the dole, though the number of recipients
is too less.
FEEDS
Only nine persons have got the allowance in Bengal
RSS and one in Kerala. The figure for Tripura, also ruled by
My Yahoo! the Left, is 63. Seventy-eight persons have received it in
Aruna Roy, Jean Dreze
SEARCH Jharkhand, 543 in Orissa, 679 in Karnataka, 1,144 in
Maharashtra and 1,074 in Madhya Pradesh. The scheme aims to employ four crore
people each year.
Archives Web
The problem was one of the many raised by Jean Dreze and Aruna Roy, seen as one of
Search the scheme’s architects, at a news conference today.

ARCHIVES The duo — members of the Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council (NAC) and
Since 1st March, 1999 the Central Employment Guarantee Council (CEGC), the apex body monitoring the
plan’s implementation — have written to the ministry highlighting the lapses. They see
the flaws as signs of the authorities trying to avoid accountability.
THE TELEGRAPH
- About Us “Non-payment of unemployment allowance is only one manifestation of the general
- Advertise resistance of both central and state governments to any sort of accountability under the
- Feedback NREGA, defeating the whole purpose of the act,” the letter says.
- Contact Us Dreze and Roy turned the spotlight on another problem: delay in payment of wages.
“You (the ministry) could equally have asked how many workers have ever been
compensated for delays in wage payments. To my knowledge, there is only one case of
such compensation (in Jharkhand), even though delays in wage payments have caused
immense hardships to NREGA workers in the last two years. Similarly, there are only
two cases of any government officer for dereliction of (NREGA-related) duty.”

The UPA government has ruined its own achievement by “resisting accountability” in its

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9/28/2010 The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Na…
implementation, the letter said.

Dreze alleged that CEGC had been reduced to a body whose advice was ignored, and
said he hoped to raise the problems at the NAC. “A series of measures are required if
the gains made through NREGA are to be preserved,’’ the letter said.

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