right of poor people information for india nrega scheme

It is often the case that poor people do not fully access the public services due to them. Information-based interventions have been proposed as a response. The premise is that lack of information is a decisive demand-side factor inhibiting successful participatory action by poor people to get the services to which they are entitled.
Of course, incomplete information is not the only reason why poor people do not take up their entitlements. And nor is knowledge exogenous to the forces that create their poverty. What one considers one’s “rights” in an Indian village (say) may depend more on what local officials and elites say than on rather abstract central dictates in official legislation, far removed from the realities of daily life. Possibly people do not know their rights because there is no point knowing them when the reality of their lives does not admit those rights in practice. An information campaign will not then be sufficient for people to be willing and able to take action to get what they are due. The same factors that create poverty may make information about one’s legal rights largely irrelevant to one’s agency in accessing services.
The social psychology of an information campaign is relevant here. We learn from psychology that information absorption is a selective, choice-based, process. If new public information about one’s rights under the law is in an uncomfortable dissonance with long-standing beliefs based on the realities of one’s experiences then that new information will be suppressed or simply ignored as some irrelevant fiction. The information campaign will fail.
Alternatively, the campaign may succeed in changing social perceptions relevant to the public program but not individual efficacy in accessing that program. In principle, a persuasive campaign may make one think differently, and more positively, about the local environment in the abstract, but not change the reality for anyone. The campaign creates a “groupthink.” Each individual may instead come to think that he or she is an exception to the norm described by the information campaign.  This distortion to beliefs may well come to be corrected in time through the sharing of experience via social interaction. But this will take time. 
So does information on rights and processes make a difference .

                                                                                             GSSS SECRETARY   

                                                                                         GHANSHYAM TIWARI