PALAKKAD: The State Government is planning to formulate a procurement manual setting guidelines for purchasing materials for the works to be carried out under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS). When the MNREGS was extended to the whole of the State, the previous LDF Government had stopped the purchases of work materials through purchasing committees constituted at the level of local bodies on August 20,2010.After the LDF Government discouraged the use of materials purchased thus, a decline has occurred in the ratio of materials purchased to manpower. Though the guidelines states that the manpower to material ratio can be 60:40,currently it is 90:10. A rate committee headed by the District Collector is fixing the rates of work materials, including river sand, cement, metal, rubble and steel. Subsequently, the purchasing committee headed by the panchayat president, secretary, engineer and chairmen of standing committees will invite quotations for the supply of materials. The rates of the materials should not exceed the ones fixed by the rate committee. Now, the State Government has asked for a report from all districts about the system of purchase. The state-level and district-level officers have studied the methodology of the purchase and submitted a report. It will be on the basis of these reports that a procurement manual will be put in place, which will apply to all the grama panchayats in the state. “We are finalising the manual. The State Institute of Rural Development has already held workshops involving block development officers, engineers and overseers. The manual will specify from where to purchase materials and the procedures to be adopted so that there will be transparency,” said Rural Development Commissioner M Nandakumar. He said that before the finalisation of the manual, it will be subjected to a lot of discussions involving the elected representatives at the grassroot level. “The manual will be uniform through out the state and it will be ready within a month. It will also specify the wages for the skilled workers, who are used in some of the works,” said Joint Development Commissioner Shashidharan Nair. “In Palakkad, we had studied the two panchayats-Akkathethara and Thachampara and submitted a report to the Government. In Akkathethara, the system adopted was fool proof with five persons shortlisted to supply materials and then the rate decided after negotiations. “However, in Thachampara, though they had abided by the general guidelines and there were no discrepancies. It was not upto the mark,” said Assistant Development Commissioner (Performance audit) K S Abdul Saleem. For instance, earlier, under the MNREGS the sidewalls of the ponds and canals were protected with round rubble masonry, but with the use of the coir-based geo textiles the soil erosion is now checked. The beneficiary here were the factories under the state run Coir Corporation.(see picture). Usually, the ward-level gramasabha identifies the work, checks the vouchers,records and submits a social audit report to the grama panchayat, which should be accepted. The ratification by the gramasabha is uploaded into the NREGS website periodically. The MNREGS was initially started in Palakkad and Wayanad February 2, 2006. In the second phase,it was extended to Idukki and Kasaragod and subsequently to all the districts.
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