New Delhi | Wage payments under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme will now be done only through the Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS), sources said on Monday. The last extension of the deadline to state governments to make the payments mandatory through the system ended on December 31.
The sources said it has been conveyed to states that payments will now be made only through the ABPS. If any state has any grievance, it will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, they said.
The ABPS uses the 12-digit Aadhaar number as a worker's financial address. For ABPS-enabled payments, a worker's Aadhaar details are seeded with their job card and the Aadhaar has to be linked to the worker's bank account.
There are around 14.28 crore active workers under the MGNREGS as per data on January 1, according to the Aadhaar Demographic Verification Status Report on the website of the Union rural development ministry.
Aadhaar seeding has been done for 13.48 crore workers. While 12.90 crore workers' Aadhaar has been confirmed, around 12.49 crore workers have been converted to the Aadhaar-Based Payment System. This means around 12.5 per cent of active workers under the MGNREGS are still not ABPS enabled.
When it comes to total workers, according to data on January 1, there are about 25.89 crore workers under the MGNREGS, of which 17.37 crore are in the ABPS. This means over 32 per cent workers are not eligible for ABPS.
An order was issued in January last year to make payments through the ABPS mandatory under the MGNREGS and the government had first fixed February 1 as the deadline.
It, however, was extended many times throughout the last year. The deadline was first extended to March 31, then till June 30 and then August 31. In August, the deadline was extended till December 31.
The last extension was done as several states were lagging behind in linking Aadhaar numbers of workers, according to the sources.
The ABPS dashboard on the MGNREGS website states that 87.8 per cent of the active workers are ABPS eligible, and over 1.5 crore are still to be ABPS enabled.
The dashboard also says the speed of "Aadhaar enablement" is slow to meet the now already crossed deadline of December 31.
According to researcher Laavanya Tamang, who is with LibTech India and the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, making ABPS mandatory without proper infrastructure being in place may lead to workers being excluded.
"Making ABPS mandatory can lead to exclusion of workers from the MGNREGS. It can possibly lead to deletion of cards when authentication does not succeed. When you make something mandatory when the bureaucracy is not ready, the infrastructure is not ready, people will lose out," Tamang said.
She added that while the government has maintained no one will be turned away from demanding work, it is not clear how it will happen.
A working paper published in August last year by LibTech had said making Aadhaar mandatory will put immense pressure on field staff to ensure compliance of workers with the ABPS architecture, and Aadhaar seeding with one's job card and bank account needs demographic authentication.
"When this demographic authentication fails due to technical reasons, there are reports that field officials resort to deleting job cards of such workers," the paper had said.
MGNREGS' job cards entailing over 5.48 crore workers have been deleted in 2022-23 a jump of 267 per cent compared to last year, the rural development ministry had informed the Lok Sabha in the recently concluded Parliament's Winter session.
In a statement issued in August last year, when the last extension was made, the ministry had said states have been informed that beneficiaries who come for work should be requested to provide their Aadhaar number but will not be refused work on this basis.
If a beneficiary does not demand work, in such a case her/his status of eligibility for APBS does not affect the demand for work and job cards cannot be deleted on the basis of reason that the worker is not eligible for APBS, it had said.
New Delhi | As Aadhaar-based payment system (ABPS) became mandatory for MGNREGA wage payments from Monday, Rural Development Ministry said if certain gram panchayats have "technical issues", the government may consider them for an exemption.
"The Government of India has decided to make the wage payment of unskilled workers through ABPS to ensure the payment of beneficiaries into their bank accounts, even in case of frequent change of bank account by the beneficiary. In case, if any Gram Panchayat is having either technical problem or Aadhaar-related problem, the government may consider exemption from ABPS on a case-to-case basis till the resolution of the issue," the ministry said in a statement.
The development comes on a day when Congress leader Jairam Ramesh accused the Modi government of "weaponising technology", especially Aadhaar, to deny the most vulnerable Indians their social welfare benefits.
The Rural Development Ministry said the real time attendance of the beneficiaries working at a worksite is being captured with the help of National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) app, and beneficiaries as well as any citizen can check the "genuineness of the workers".
"Similarly, geotagging of assets using remote sensing technology is ensuring the availability of assets for public scrutiny. National Electronic Fund Management System was started in FY 2016-17 to provide wage payment directly into the account of beneficiaries. Currently, more than 99 per cent wage payment is being made directly into the bank/post office accounts of beneficiaries. Such best practices are new for the implementation of the scheme," the ministry said.
It also said specific pilot study as well as consultation has been done before the launch of NMMS.
While stating that Aadhaar seeding of beneficiaries is a "continuous process and is done as a de-duplication exercise to authenticate the genuine beneficiaries", the ministry said out of the total 14.32 crore active workers, Aadhaar seeding of 14.08 crore (98.31 per cent) active workers have already been completed.
Against these seeded Aadhaar, a total 13.76 crore Aadhaar cards have been authenticated and 87.52 per cent active workers are now eligible for ABPS.
The ministry also said while total registered job cards are 14.32 crore, just 9.77 crore (68.22 per cent) are active job cards. "There is a total of 25.25 crore workers, out of which just 14.32 crore (56.83 percent) are active workers."
The ministry said the claims that around 34.8 per cent of total registered workers and 12.7 per cent of active workers are still ineligible for ABPS "have no relevance, because ABPS is applicable only in case a registered beneficiary turns up for wage employment".
The government also denied that job cards may get deleted due to Aadhaar linking.
"Job card of household can be deleted only in certain specific conditions, but not due to ABPS. Updation/deletion of job cards is a regular exercise conducted by the States/UTs... From April, 2022 to till date, about 2.85 crore job cards have been deleted by following the due process by the States," the statement said.
MGNREGS' job cards entailing over 5.48 crore workers have been deleted in 2022-23, a jump of 267 per cent compared to last year, Minister of State for Rural Development Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti had informed the Lok Sabha during the recently concluded Winter session of Parliament.
The Rural Development Ministry added that NPCI data shows that there is higher success percentage to the extent of 99.55 per cent or above where the Aadhaar is enabled for DBT. In case of account-based payment, such success is about 98 per cent.
Wage payments under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) will now be done only through the ABPS now after last extension of the deadline to state governments to make the payments mandatory through the system ended on December 31.
New Delhi | With an Aadhaar-based system becoming mandatory for MGNREGA payments, the Congress on Monday said the Modi government should "stop weaponising technology", especially Aadhaar, to deny the most vulnerable Indians their social welfare benefits.
The opposition party also condemned it and alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "well-known disdain for MGNREGA has translated into a slew of experiments designed to use technology as a weapon to exclude".
Wage payments under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme will now be done only through the Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS), sources said on Monday. The last extension of the deadline to state governments to make the payments mandatory through the system ended on December 31.
The sources said it has been conveyed to states that payments will now be made only through the ABPS. If any state has any grievance, it will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, they said.
In a statement, Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh said, "There are in total 25.69 crore MGNREGA workers of whom 14.33 crore are considered as active workers. As on December 27, 34.8 per cent of total registered workers (8.9 crore) and 12.7 per cent of active workers (1.8 crore) are still ineligible for ABPS."
Despite many challenges highlighted by workers, practitioners and researchers in using ABPS for MGNREGA wage payments, the Modi government has continued with its "destructive experiments with technology", he said.
"This is prime minister's cruel new year gift to exclude crores of the poorest and marginalised Indians from earning a basic income," he alleged.
Ramesh pointed out that a statement issued by the MoRD dated August 30, 2023, made certain questionable claims such as job cards will not be deleted on the basis that the worker is not eligible for APBS and that different "stakeholders" in certain "consultations" have found ABPS as the best route for making wage payment.
It also claimed that ABPS helps workers get their wage on time and avoids transaction rejections, Ramesh noted.
"First, since April 2022, an alarming 7.6 crore registered workers were deleted from the system. 1.9 crore registered workers were deleted from the system nine months into the current financial year. Ground verification of deleted workers has shown that a significant number of deletions have been wrongfully done -- as a result of the tearing hurry of the Modi government to implement Aadhaar authentication and ABPS," he alleged.
Ramesh said the ministry must clarify who these "stakeholders" were and when these consultations were held.
"In fact, the Modi government has turned a deaf ear to the multiple concerns from numerous delegations on the implementation of ABPS and other technological interventions," he claimed.
"The MoRD's claims regarding the increase in payment efficiency with the ABPS, which remain unsubstantiated, have been thoroughly debunked by a LibTech India working paper. The study analysed 3.2 crore wage transactions to demonstrate that there is no statistically significant difference in the time taken to process account and Aadhaar based payments by the Union government," he said.
The working paper also shows that the difference in rejection rates between ABPS and the account-based payments is statistically negligible, he added.
"The PM's well-known disdain for MGNREGA has translated into a slew of experiments designed to use technology as a weapon to exclude -- such as the digital attendance (NMMS), ABPS, drone monitoring and the proposed integration of facial recognition to NMMS," Ramesh alleged.
No due consultation or scientific piloting was done before unleashing these experiments on crores of Indians, he claimed.
"The Indian National Congress reiterates its demand of August 30, 2023, that the Modi government should stop weaponising technology, especially Aadhaar to deny the most vulnerable Indians their social welfare benefits, release delayed wage payments and implement open muster rolls and social audits to improve transparency," Ramesh said in his statement.
