Thousands of men and women employed under the the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) from Telangana are set to stage dharnas in front of district collectorates across the state on June 5, protesting the Aadhaar Based Payment System (ABPS) and digital attendance through the NREGA Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) app.
To be eligible for APBS wage payments which depend on the Aadhaar verification, a worker has to fulfil certain mandatory requirements, including identification, fingerprints, and Know Your Customer (KYC) documents. Workers and activists alike are concerned that the Union government’s decision to step in directly, sidelining the state government, could have disastrous consequences.
A report prepared by LibTech India, a non-profit working for rural communities and poverty elimination, and published by Azim Premji University titled ‘Length of the Last Mile Delays and Hurdles in NREGA Wage Payments’ noted that Aadhaar-based payments and centralisation has meant that workers “have little clue regarding where their wages have been credited and what to do when their payments get rejected.” Though this report was published in November 2020, the Union government is still rolling out ABPS everywhere.
While the NMMS app was made mandatory from January 1 this year, ABPS was enforced from February 1. Workers, civil society organisations, and field level stakeholders believe that the new systems will further complicate the wage payments, resulting in delays and non-disbursal. In February, workers from different states staged a marathon 50-day protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar; their demands also included disbursal of pending wages.
A Field Assistant from Telangana who didn’t want to be named said, “With the new ABPS system, no one has any idea whether wages have been paid or not, and we are never sure to which account the wages have been remitted. Sometimes the payments are being credited to accounts other than the duly authorised ones.”
When a group of 10 NREGA workers In Telangana’s Kamareddy district complained to their Field Assistant regarding non-payment of wages, they were told that the wages had been blocked because of a name-related error in a KYC document submitted by one of them. The person was directed to another bank to open a new account, while the payment for the whole group was held up until the new account was opened. There were scores of such situations, according to activists.
Suman Narsapuram, a graduate who is still dependent on NREGA for sustenance, said, “It was said that ABPS would ensure transparency in wage payments, but the fact is no one knows for sure whether wages due have been remitted. This involves the worker going through a lot of avoidable hardships. In fact, most of the workers, barely literate, cannot be expected to understand all the technicalities involved. They end up running around the banks and officials.”
A tribal family of three members from Chintapalli in Andhra Pradesh’s Alluri Sitharama Raju district who worked under NREGA is awaiting their wages for over two years, this reporter found. When they approached the bank where they had been made to open accounts, they found the wages had not been credited. When LibTech India enquired on their behalf, they were shocked to note that as much as Rs 37,000 due to the family had been remitted to another bank where they had no account at all.
It turns out that the problem occurred when executives of the United Bank of India – in their rush to achieve targets – opened Jan Dhan accounts en masse for all the residents of a village in Chintapalli mandal. But the NREGA machinery had not been kept in the loop.
Chakradhar Buddha, a policy analyst with LibTech India, said, “The government claimed that the new ABPS will help set up a transparent mechanism and prevent malpractices. However, the ground reality is different. It only created chaos instead of sorting out issues, as was hoped.”
According to him, when there are multiple accounts in one person’s name, the wages are credited to a bank linked with the Mapper Systems, a computer software used by the National Payments Commission of India (NPCI), something the beneficiaries cannot be expected to know.
“Moreover, a substantial percentage of worker names were deleted by officials during the process of Aadhaar seeding and authentication. Consequently, there was a huge surge in the number of names deleted, by as much as 250% compared to last year,” Chakradhar alleged.
Hyderabad-based Telangana NREGA Protection Committee, a body composed of different civil society organisations, said that it looked as if ABPS and NMMS had been brought in only to ruin the NREGA prospects. As per official data, only 43% of NREGA workers are “eligible for ABPS,” which means lakhs of people would remain unpayable if the government doesn’t roll back its decision. In Telangana, there are only 63.34 lakh workers eligible for ABPS against over 1.05 crore NREGA workers, while Andhra has over 1.14 crore workers eligible for ABPS against 1.22 crore total workers.
Thus thousands who face difficulties in making their existing accounts ABPS-compliant are left high and dry, defeating the very objective of the scheme, which is to provide a bare minimum of food and financial security to the disadvantaged.
P Shanker, convenor of the NREGA Protection Committee, said, “With a poor budget allocation for NREGA, which is an all time low (0.198% of the GDP), the Union government has already thrown a spanner in the works, and the push for ABPS is another ploy to exhaust the workers with technical and clerical work so that they give up on NREGA altogether. What is the need for the new system at all, let the government spell it out.”
He added, “The ABPS and NMMS have already been proven to be a disaster as they’re untested and unregulated technologies. Attendance through the NMMS app is not always viable as the works take place in isolated areas with no network. Marking attendance, which is done by uploading onsite images, is a nightmare as the app fails due to technical glitches. So sometimes workers end up working without pay, thanks to NMMS.”
According to the Committee, there is no designated resolving mechanism or channel when ABPS payments fail, unlike with the non-ABPS payments.
Jean Dreze, the noted economist who was able to persuade the previous UPA government to adopt the NREGA, says in his foreword to the LibTech India report referred to earlier: “When the NREGA wage payment system moved to Aadhaar-based payments such as Direct Bank Transfer (DBT) and Aadhaar Payment Bridge System (APBS), a new generation of payment problems emerged. One of them was the problem of ‘rejected payment’ ... Nearly Rs 5,000 crore of NREGA wage payments were rejected during the last five years.” The result is, “To access their wages, almost half of NREGA workers have to make multiple visits to the bank or payment agency.”
What is happening is a harrowing normalisation of hardships for the hapless workers, he adds.
Besides condemning centralisation of NREGA as motivated, activists and organisations such as NREGA Sangarsh Manch, which led the Jantar Mantar protest, are demanding that the NMMS app be revoked and ABPS given up immediately.
Charan Teja is a journalist based in Telangana who predominantly reports and writes on rural affairs, caste, politics, and forest/environmental rights from both the Telugu states.