This village is a synonym for the National Employment Guarantee Scheme, going by its transformation from being a landmass without any water resources and known for mass migrations to a green village with more than 30 families returning to their roots to grow horticulture crops and make a decent living.
Situated on an elevated plain with no overground water storage facilities and a non-dependable groundwater table, till 2006 Bandlapalli used to be a typical dryland Rayalaseema village as rainwater used to run down to B. Pappur tank. But with the infusion of ₹8.88 crore in the form of wage payments and material components, the transformation is visible.
On the 15th anniversary on Tuesday (February 2) of the launch of the scheme from this remote village in Narpala mandal by the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006, The Hindu met Cheemala Peddakka, the first woman to receive the ‘Job Card’ under the MGNREGS and ascertained her views on its impact.
A Dalit widow with two kids to support, she used to get ₹20 a day as wages for any agriculture work, but the implementation of the NREGS ensured she got ₹50 a day for at least 100 days in a year, but more importantly, it wiped out the gender inequality in wages, she opines and that has improved her standard of life with non-NREGS work also fetching her twice the amount she used to get.
“Today I get more than ₹200 a day for the hard work I put in either in agriculture fields or for assets creation under the NREGS,” explains Peddakka, who treasures the Job Card given back then as a souvenir for being the agent of change in her life. “I grow groundnut and Bengal gram in a 2-acre farm with the help of my two sons, who too have Job Cards. Unable to sink a borewell, we had left the land barren earlier, but now with the creation of ‘farm ponds’ on the periphery of our panchayat, we have sufficient water,” she explains.
Velpula Narayana Reddy, the then Sarpanch who had shared the dais with the Prime Minister, who is 83 years old now, proudly recollects how he along with other villagers had ensured every needy person got a Job Card and developed water storage infrastructure to store runaway water from the hill slopes.
“We developed watersheds on the two hill streams and got farm ponds, which significantly improved the groundwater table and my own 17-acre farm is an example. We had five bores, which never yielded water, but today we grow bottle gourd, maize, green gram and Bengal gram,” says Mr. Narayana Reddy.
District Water Management Agency project director N. Venugopal Reddy told The Hindu that 5.04 lakh man days were created in this panchayat of 3,000 people in 15 years and ₹7.61 crore paid as wages and ₹1.27 crore as material component, which has helped in developing the village. Currently, 777 job cards are active and many have benefited immensely during the pandemic, he observes.
Published - February 01, 2021 11:41 pm IST
