|
|
|
|
It’s scam time once again in Bihar. About 20 lakh people in the state managed to get two job cards as farm labourers to siphon off at least Rs 700 crore, if not more. And most of them are not really labourers, but villagers who are above the ‘poverty line.’ But thanks to information technology introduced in governance, the scam could not remain hidden when the government uploaded records on the Management Information System. The latest mess has a distinct similarity with the one in which lakhs of school girls and boys walked away with two or more cycles, uniforms and other benefits by getting admitted in more than one schools. |
As per the MNREGA scheme, each farm labourer should get 100 days of work every year; and they are paid the minimum wage, which in Bihar is Rs 145. Thus, a labourer can earn Rs 14,500 annually, provided he gets 100 days of work. Now, if 20 lakh labourers have got two job cards, then the amount illegally withdrawn is Rs 14,500 x 2,000,000; it comes to Rs 29,000,000,000 or Rs 2,900 crore. It is true that in Bihar the farm labourers do not get job for 100 days. But, even if they get job for 50 days, the amount would be half of that; and if they get job for 25 days, it would be one-fourth of the estimated amount. That means, the scam is no less than of Rs 7,000,000,000 or Rs 700 crore.
This is not the first story of its kind. Last year, a huge scam in the education department was unearthed when it was detected that there were 3,36,000 ghost students—out of a total of 10,00,000—in the nine district of Bihar. These ghost students were largely enrolled to avail government freebies, like bicycle, uniform, mid-day meal, etc. If the figure is extrapolated to the whole state, it may cross even two-million mark and the money siphoned off could be in thousand crores. It dented the government’s claim of attaining 97 per cent enrolment rate in 2011, against 88 per cent in 2005. But, the government never came out with the exact number of ghost students in the state as demanded by the Opposition. Rather, state’s HRD minister, PK Shahi has a different take: “Discrepancies of such kind must not be called scams. I do not consider it a scam.”
Similarly, a government report prepared on the basis of Global Positioning System found that at least 1,875 government-run schools in Bihar do not exist; and 3000 schools are running under the trees. Most of them exist only on paper. And these findings are not comforting the Nitish government. “Certainly, the government has taken many IT-based initiatives. But transparency can become hard to swallow,” said Prof. Ajay Kumar Jha. Surely, Nitish Kumar is learning about the double effect to technology. E-governance improves governance, but it can hurt too.
Published in The Sunday Standard
|
