Demand for work under the rural job guarantee scheme rose to the highest level since 2021 this summer as climate change and an unpredictable monsoon destroyed agricultural livelihoods.
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) provides a safety net for agricultural households, guaranteeing 100 days of paid work for them in a year.
However, the scheme rarely lives up to its promise of guaranteeing 100 days of work. Additionally, a recent government order to make all wage payments through the Aadhaar Based Payment System (ABPS) has disqualified millions of beneficiaries.
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No guarantee
Seeking work under MNREGA hardly guarantees employment. The latest data shows that more than 100,000 poor rural households, or almost 200,000 registered workers, have not been successful in seeking work under the scheme so far this financial year.
A standing committee report presented in Parliament earlier this year highlighted the glitches in implementing MNREGA and the MPs said the number of days a rural household is entitled to get guaranteed work should be extended to 150 through an act of Parliament.
However, when 100,000 households are unable to get any work, the chances of increasing the 100-day guarantee are slim for now. Also, so far in FY24, only about 30 days of employment have been provided to households seeking work.
In each of the past five years, a household demanding work under the scheme has found it for less than 50 days on average. The inability of so many needy households to get paid work comes when 34 million households sought work under MNREGA in June.
The previous high was 44.7 million households demanding work in June 2021, after the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown the previous year led to a mass migration of people from urban areas back to their villages. In May 2021, 37.3 million households sought work under MNREGA due to financial duress.
The number of households looking for work in June 2023 was 2 million more than the number in May and 10 million more than in April.
“Quite clearly, there is dependence on this scheme (MNREGA) for employment,” said Madan Sabnavis, chief economist at Bank of Baroda. “Late monsoon in several parts contributed to this demand in June. In general, rural opportunities are not there.”
Aadhar woes, deletions
Activists pointed out that demand for work under MNREGA may actually be much higher than the 34 million households in June. That’s because the names of millions of registered workers were struck off as they were ineligible for ABPS.
Overall, 43 percent of about 270 million registered workers became ineligible for ABPS.
Earlier this year, the government ordered all wage payments to be made through ABPS. This rendered millions of workers registered under MNREGA ineligible and activists are reporting large-scale deletions of workers in some states.
The ineligibility was due to a mismatch in the spelling of the beneficiary’s name between the MNREGA database and ABPS, or even a gender mismatch. Theoretically, these mistakes can be corrected, but the process becomes cumbersome due to the sheer number of cases involved. Also, workers themselves are mostly unaware of the reasons for deletion and, in many cases, of the deletion itself.
Data shared by LibTech India, an NGO working for rural service delivery, shows that three in four registered workers in Assam and Maharashtra became ineligible to receive payments through ABPS, and two in three in Goa and Gujarat were ineligible. Almost 12 million registered workers in Uttar Pradesh and about 9.2 million in Rajasthan were ineligible.
“Block officials many times find it easier to delete names of registered workers than make corrections. Also, if a job card gets deleted, no one in the household can access work under MNREGA. In FY23, 5.2 crore workers across the country got deleted,” said Chakradhar Buddha, a researcher at LibTech India.
There have been many representations made to the government by activists who represent workers, including the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, against making ABPS mandatory for payment of wages under MNREGA, but apart from pushing the deadline for ABPS (the latest is August 31), these pleas have fallen on deaf ears.
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The Ministry of Rural Development said last month that due to frequent changes in bank account numbers by MNREGA beneficiaries and non-updating of the new account number by the programme officer, several wage payment transactions were rejected by banks.
“ABPS is the best route for making wage payment through DBT (Direct Benefit Transfer)… Once Aadhaar is updated in the scheme database, the beneficiary need not update account numbers due to a change in location or change in bank account number. Money will be transferred to the account number which is linked with the Aadhaar number,” the ministry said.
The ministry said ABPS has been in use for MNREGA wage payments since 2017 and there was 99.55 percent success in payments when the Aadhaar number of the beneficiary was enabled for DBT.
“The payment will land through ABPS only in the account associated with ABPS, which means that it is a safer and faster way of payment transfer,” it said.
Of the 142.8 million active beneficiaries, Aadhaar has been seeded for 137.5 million, the ministry said, adding that against these numbers, 121.7 million have been authenticated and 77.81 percent are now eligible for ABPS. The ministry asserted that job cards, which have been already issued, cannot be deleted if a worker is ineligible for ABPS.
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