THE All India Agricultural Workers Union has in a statement issued on July 8, said that the poorest people in the country will not accept the manner in which the NDA government at the centre has hurt the thousands of migrant labourers driven from their villages to seek distress employment in the cities and other states, by sharply raising the passenger rail fares by over 14 % which they will not be able to afford without taking higher debts than before from local money lenders or brutal labour contractors whose criminal rates of interest are painful already. AIAWU has therefore appealed to the government to roll back the rail price hike which was a policy of the previous UPA government opposed by the NDA at that time. Equally disturbing is the government’s failure to control the price rise which is even worse today, especially for food items at a period when the per capita availability of food grains remains close to famine conditions. To make matters worse, a freight rise of over 6 % by the railways, and the increase in price of LPG, diesel and petrol by the central government cannot be accepted, the statement said. Moreover, from this perspective, the C Rangarajan Committee report that places the poverty line at a daily expenditure of Rs 47 in urban areas and Rs 32 in rural areas is nothing more than an insult to India’s poor and will not be tolerated. The people of India voted against these policies of the UPA as a result of which the BJP claiming to end them won the elections. Any backtracking will meet resistance of the people at every step, the statement warned. It demanded that forward trading in food stuffs and export of food items in times of scarcity be forbidden altogether. The supply side should be strengthened with the restitution of the universal public distribution system and the provision of 35 kg of grain per month per nuclear family at not more than Rs 2 per kg. It also demanded that all states be given their full quota of PDS to prevent regional scarcity being utilised by profiteers and that farmers be allowed to sell produce beyond the limits of their local mandis that are controlled by monopolists. The AIAWU wanted the MGNREGA allocation to be increased by the center in this budget as it is a law and has succeeded in providing employment to over four crore people and has certainly increased the bargaining power of the poorest in the rural areas. However the UPA government while claiming credit for this law, actually brought down the allocation from 0.5 % of the GDP in 2008-09 to 0.4 % in 2012-13. Both the central and a number of state governments further vitiated the implementation of this law and 22.11 % of allocated funds were left unspent in 2011-12 and this rose to 32.82 in 2012-13. Moreover no new job cards were issued since 2010-11 and the issuance of job cards has stagnated at 1277.15 lakhs since last four years and the average number of households that benefited from the law has dwindled from 549.47 lakhs in 2010-11 to 408.06 lakhs in 2013-14. Out of a total outlay of Rs 33,000 crore approved for 2012-13, only Rs 25,894.03 crore has been released and the total fund available with the states including the opening balance of Rs 10,009.09 crore is Rs 41,788.74 crore. Of this, Rs 28,073.51 crore has been utilised (as on 31.01.2013) and 4.39 crore households have been provided employment for 156.01 crore person-days of which 82.58 crore (53 per cent) were availed of by women, 34.56 crore (22 per cent) by SCs, and 24.90 crore (16 per cent) by STs. Given this reality we can see that one way of cushioning the poorest sections from the worst effects of the price rise is to ensure a broader and better functioning of MGNREGA than before. AIAWU further demanded that the days of work to be provided be increased to 250 days at a minimum wage of Rs 300 per day. Only then will this law go some way in mitigating the evils of the price rise. We believe that the coming budget should address itself seriously to the issue of implementing MGNREGA efficiently. Finally the comprehensive central legislation for agricultural workers that has been on the cards in draft form since 1980 should now be put forward as an important task to be accomplished in the coming budget. A failure to do this will force us on the road to direct action to ensure that around 20 crore people of our country are not left to starve or flee from pillar to post to keep alive.