Not by laws alone

Long years ago, the government passed a law that abolished bonded labour, then it passed another law that did the same thing — but bondage continues. In the same way, child labour was abolished, then abolished again — but this too continues in broad daylight, in city and countryside. Private money-lending has been outlawed, but money-lenders remain the principal source of debt finance for the poor and even the not-so-poor, across the country. Minimum wages have been legislated, and the numbers get updated periodically, but with the labour market saddled with excess supply at the bottom end, the law is as good as a dead letter in vast stretches of the countryside. These examples can be multiplied almost ad infinitum, and all of them tell the country the same thing: it is easy to pass a law that is full of good intentions, and quite another to change reality.

That lesson is now being learnt all over again, in the context of the new law on giving tribal people rights to forest land in their traditional habitats. The initial reports on how the new law is being implemented in different states (three of them have been carried in this newspaper over the past few days) make it crystal clear that once again the poor and the disadvantaged will be shortchanged, officials and the local power elite will play havoc, and the end result will be sub-optimal and unsatisfactory. Indeed, as with the two-year-old programme for guaranteeing work in the rural areas, all the systemic safeguards that were thought up by well-meaning bureaucrats, often with the help of civil society activists, are like so much useless paperwork when the programme starts getting implemented. The report of the Comptroller and Auditor General on the manner in which the mandatory procedures for the NREG programme have been routinely ignored, and replaced by extreme ad hocism, bears testimony to the shadow between intention and reality. That experience is now being repeated in the case of the tribal rights law.

Some points are worth noting. One is the evident lack of political mobilisation to help the poor claim their rights. For all the emphasis on the ‘aam aadmi’, the hard truth is that people do not enter politics to work with or amongst the poor, or to empower the disadvantaged. Politics is a route to power and pelf, while shedding crocodile tears for the poor. The only people who are actively engaged out there are the civil society activists, but their record is patchy and their reach cannot match that of the government. The second point is that the administrative system itself is essentially predatory in approach. There may be honest and well-intentioned people in the system, but they are heavily outnumbered by those who would either like to do as little work as possible, or cook up the numbers, or simply be the handmaidens of the local power elite (as the experience with the NREG programme too has shown). The result, as Rahul Gandhi discovered during his recent tour of Karnataka, is that people in the villages are not even aware of the NREGA. Why, even in the case of that third enactment which completes the calling card of the UPA government, namely the law on the right to information, there is till now hardly any case where a government servant has been penalised for subverting the law and not providing the required information. In other words, passing laws and then waiting for good things to happen is an exercise in delusion — of self or of the public depends on one’s intent. If real change is to be brought about, much harder work has to be done.
Business Standard / New Delhi April 04, 2008