Vijaypura (India), 14 mar (EFE).-at the top of a mountain, the Mayor of Vijaypura, in the Indian Rajasthan, welcomes the achievement of greater plan of rural employment in the world, which has filled with trees and vegetation which was a rocky and semi-arid environment.

Vijaypura is one of the places where works well the law National Rural guarantee of employment Mahatma Gandhi (MGNREGA) of the India, which stipulates a payment of $ 2.4 per day for a maximum of one hundred days worked in non-specialist public works in the field.

With this program, EfE has the Mayor of the town, Rukmani Devi Salvi, farmers have spent years digging trenches and building dams and wells to conserve water, and have paved roads in the vicinity.

“Our land is very bad, but now we have grass for the animals and to lakes,” explains, while noted pits, bushes and a newly built well in which peasant dressed in colourful saris are struggling to get cubes.

MGNREGA plan was approved in 2005 and only this exercise have benefited from him almost 38 million homes Indian, although criticisms by spending (8.8 billion dollars this year) are frequent, corruption or its effect on inflation in the field.

“The Government has to study the implementation of the plan and see where it is really necessary.” “Five years have passed and it is easy to know where there is corruption and where no”, EfE has the officer of the programme in the area, Raj Kumar Ji Banjara.

But Vijaypura, say villagers, the MGNREGA it works, partly because each spending is scrupulously painted to brush on the walls of the Town Hall so that everyone knows in what allocated funds are spent.

In the area has its headquarters the syndicate led by the influential activist Aruna Roy, the power group of peasant labour (MKSS), which was instrumental in the adoption of the right to information (RTI) Act and the MGNREGA.

Roy arrived here as an officer of the Government in 1987, and then he left his job to devote himself entirely to the area, very poor, scene of frequent droughts and where he stayed to live in a simple cottage located in the village of Devdungri.

From his home – adobe, without water flow – Roy and the MKSS activists began a campaign against corruption that crystallized with the adoption of the law on right to information, and then capitanearon the implementation of MGNREGA.

“The basic use of a hundred days a year means dignity, respect, participation in democracy.” “The MGNREGA is strong thanks to the Information Act, because we now have the right to ask questions to the Government,” said Efe Roy in Delhi.

High rates of growth of the India in this decade have benefited above all urban elites, but 833 million Indians (69%) living in the countryside and most of them are still occupied in agricultural tasks and with almost pure subsistence resources.

The model of growth has fueled the sector services and manufacturing, but leaders and Indian officials assume, without knowing very well how do so, needing a massive transfer of population from the countryside to the city.

Oblivious to that shoulder, the Salvi Mayor believes that the agricultural plan is a blessing: in Vijaypura have begun to manage scarce water and with the nascent weed some peasants have encouraged to buy livestock, in reality a few goats.

“Before people didn’t work.” But now women have started to work and have their own money. You can buy things, you can buy jewellery or giving them the win. “Not dependent on both of their husbands”, says the Mayor of good humor.

“Is truth that things are more expensive now, but we have the money to do more shopping.” “The situation is better now,” adds.

She same, illiterate and “untouchable” caste, is a sign of changes in the field: arrived in the mayoral race in 2010 at the behest of her husband and former Mayor, Kalu Ram Salvi, who could not return to attend because the post was reserved to a woman in this legislature.

So is Rukmani who receives visits, and her husband who manages the paperwork and gives it to sign it: “here all families – explains it–have at least one working card”.

And walking through one of the stony areas of work, then, points proudly to a group of deer in the distance in the undergrowth, they drink in a newly created trough.

“The fields of Vijaypura – concludes – were almost a desert, but in that area, one day… someone saw a Leopard!”.

Diego Agúndez

Vijaypura, Kalu Ram Salvi, too and the Mayor, Rukmani Devi Salvi, with red sari (d) pose on 2 March to a well built through a national programme funds for the villagers, who after seven years of work have managed to repopulate a semi-arid land in the Indian Rajasthan. EFE

the Mayor of Vijaypura, Rukmani Devi Salvi, and her husband, the senior of the locality, Kalu Ram Salvi, pose last March 2 before a dam built through a national programme funds for the villagers, who after seven years of work have managed to repopulate a semi-arid land in the Indian Rajasthan. EFE