AAI work on advocacy for Employment Guarantee Act
One of central reasons of large-scale food insecurity among rural poor is lack of purchasing power, which came as a result of a number of deflationary policies at the macro economic level combined with international price decline and decline in growth of rural employment. Increase of unemployment since early 1990s was a matter of concern, though state policies and budget allocations were silent on this issue. Countries like India having around 36% people below poverty line state is expected to follow a labour intensive growth pattern; which includes stopping processes of mass labour displacement, protection of poor people's access to common property resources, provision of social security mechanisms through food for work schemes etc.

Time to time various programmes and schemes has been formulated towards implementing Right to Work, but they were temporary in nature. Since the policies and schemes are not judiciable in court, people could not have a sense of guarantee in it. The only exception is Maharashtra 's "Employment Guarantee Scheme". The programme entitles all adult to work within a fortnight of registration at any block level office; failure to provide employment creates the liability towards payment of unemployment allowance. Though the scheme was an outcome of people's struggle for protection from poverty and unemployment after the drought of 1970-73, afterwards it was implemented quite badly.

Over the years, concerns for such temporal nature of interventions by the state have been building up. Advocacy work began from various civil society groups for the introduction of a nation-wide legally binding employment guarantee programme, taking cue from Maharashtra 's experiences. The draft National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2004 was prepared by the National Advisory Council. Afterwards a series of debates happened between the pro-EGA and anti-EGA groups. Consequently that debate reached among policy makers and even parliamentarians.

Issues around the debate and campaign was around the idea of limiting the time period of coverage, administrative mechanisms to operationalise the allocations, possibility of withdrawing other welfare schemes, unclear monitoring mechanisms etc.

As part of the campaign for National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2004 Actionaid have been involved in following activities:

• Provided inputs for the Draft Bill Circulated. Got the bill circulated among various communities and culled out their comments and provided to the campaign.
• Similarly provided inputs for preparation of some of the background documents. Some of us were involved in communication and media advocacy works of the campaign.
• Circulated various documents to the partner organisations and communities and initiated discussions with them on this issue.
• Mobilised people for various events happened in order to pressurise Govt. to incorporate changes came from people's groups, e.g. various rallies in Delhi as well as other parts of the country. We have actively taken part of the signature campaign conducted all over the country.
• We have encouraged our partners to associate in the Employment Guarantee Yatra, which passed through several states and culminate in Delhi in May-June 2005.