Workers employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) will be paid their wages through the Aadhaar-based payment system from 2024. This requires workers to seed and authenticate their Aadhaar cards with their MGNREGA job cards. The Union Rural Development Ministry has however stated that workers will be given exemption on a case-to-case basis, considering that 34.8% registered workers and 12.7% workers actively employed under NREGA remain ineligible for ABPS as of December 27, 2023.
The ABPS has come under criticism several times as the process for seeding one’s job card and bank account with their Aadhaar card is a complicated process. Further, several job cards were deleted due to inconsistencies in spelling, addresses, and gender of workers involved. Repairing the error in job cards and then going about seeding and authenticating them with Aadhaar cards is time consuming.
Considering the issues involved, the Union Rural ministry granted five extensions to seed Aadhaar and job cards starting from February 1, 2023. The fifth extension to seed the cards ends on December 31, 2023.
The bank account recognised by ABPS also needs to be linked with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) mapper. When a worker has multiple bank accounts, the wages are deposited in their latest-mapped account. Field assistants who TNM had spoken to in Telangana in August 2023 had said that this also posed a problem in the authentication process as most workers have multiple accounts, as community service providers from various banks in rural areas get residents to set up accounts with them in order to meet their targets. This means it is often difficult to figure out which account is mapped and linked to ABPS.
Also Read: Why lakhs of NREGA workers are still ineligible for wages under Aadhaar-based system
“Government officials say that the account-based system is fraudulent and hence prefer an Aadhaar-based payment mechanism over it. This is despite the fact that there are several instances of fake Aadhaar cards and other issues that come up during the process,” said Srikanth Lakshmanan from Cashless Consumer, a consumer collective working on digital payments.
“If the reason for switching to Aadhaar-based payments from account-based payments is to supposedly clean up ghost beneficiaries and prevent ineligible people from receiving payments, the timing of these rule changes and election cycles need to be studied. There is also no study on ghost accounts that have Aadhaar. Switching to ABPS is not going to stop the swindling of funds either,” he adds.
The problem has been thrown up several times by members of the Opposition. Trinamool Congress MP Saketh Gokhale from West Bengal penned a letter to the Union Ministry of Rural Development’s Secretary on Tuesday, January 2, stating that wages amounting to Rs 2,700 crore have been withheld in his state for 1.5 years. Congress general secretary in charge of communications Jairam Ramesh, discussing the issue, called it the Prime Minister's “cruel New Year gift to exclude crores of the poorest and marginalised Indians from earning a basic income through public works”.