Rs 85,303 crore bust
The concept of creating employment in public works is not new for the rest of the country, because the Maharashtra model of rural employment has existed since the 1970s. The most critical difference now is that people's entitlement, by law, to employment, is now mandated through nrega for the entire country, which it earlier was only in Maharashtra. Not much has changed in the form and substance of the public work programmes in the past 20-odd years, however. Only names have.
The first set of programmes, the National Rural Employment Programme and the Rural Landless Employment Programme, began in the 1970s as clones of the Maharashtra egs. In 1989, the schemes were revamped by the Rajiv Gandhi government, which took the bold step of integrating the two schemes into one, and decided delivery would occur through the panchayati raj institutions (village-level elected institutions).
This was a heady period of development experimentation in the country. The programme was renamed, for political correctness, the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (jry); but it was radically different. The bureaucratic machinery was bypassed; funds would be deposited in the accounts of each village institution responsible for planning development activities used to create employment creation, and overseeing implementation. The scheme began but it was never given a chance to succeed. In retrospect, jry was perhaps an idea before its time.
In 1990, when prime minister V P Singh ambushed the Rajiv Gandhi government over the Bofors gun scandal, the election call was a promise to