From January 1, 2023, the Ministry of Rural Development has mandated digital capturing attendance of the workers employed under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) through the mobile application—National Mobile Monitoring System (NHMS). A directive in this regard had been sent to concerned ministry on December 23, 2022.
Now the digital attendance is mandatory for all worksites, regardless of the number of workers engaged, which was previously compulsory only for worksites with 20 or more workers from May 16 to December 31, 2022. As per the directive, the workers are required to upload two time-stamped and geotagged photographs through the NMMS.
Why the Need
The central government has cited issues such as corruption, accountability, and duplication in muster rolls. There are over 15 crore active workers under the MGNREGS. According to the government, this development would check any leakage in the programme and bring in more transparency.
The programme would increase the citizen oversight of the programme besides potentially enabling the processing of payments faster. Expectedly, it would stop any bogus attendance of workers through fake entries in physical registers. The programme would ensure that genuine workers get paid as the attendance is captured in real-time. There were also concerns that the physical register system could be manipulated, leading to the pilferage of MGNREGS funds.
Criticism and Challenges
This pilot project has received much backlash as both workers and activists have been complaining about its implementation. The job of compulsory digital attendance through the NMMS has to be done by the supervisors or mates, who are paid only marginally more than the unskilled workers. The mates complain that there has been no technical support from the government. Moreover, there are also other issues such as the necessity of owning a smartphone, paying for an Internet connection, and also poor Internet connectivity at many places.
According to the People’s Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG), a group of activists, advocating the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) 2005, has stated that this project will only discourage workers from taking up work. Since May 2022, the digital capturing of attendance has been causing disaster in many states at worksites with more than 20 workers. The requirement for smartphones is a major issue as workers are poor and cannot afford technologically advance phones. Moreover, they are not technically savvy like their urban counterparts. Even when some of the workers managed to buy smartphones, Internet connectivity in remote rural areas remained very poor. The government has also stated that if the workers do not own smart phones, the responsibility will be entrusted to the Panchayat Rojgar Sahayak (PRS). The workers have found practically difficult to travel to several sites everyday to register their attendance. As geotagged photos of the workers are required to register their attendance, they cannot postpone their attendance to the next day. Above all, there is no agency to address their grievances, either. Many activist groups have also questioned the lack of transparency behind not disclosing the survey outcome of the pilot study.
Impact of the Scheme
As per the latest figures of the Ministry of Rural Development, women make up 57.8 per cent of the total workforce of the MGNREGS. Several state governments have encouraged the women participation in the workforce as mates at worksites. Digital attendance would be a major setback for women empowerment as women are being excluded from the workforce for lack of digital literacy and access to devices. They are being replaced by males. Also, timings not being flexible, compel women in remote villages to walk several kilometres to register their attendance twice daily, which is not feasible. As per the former rural development secretary, there was flexibility of working hours—a key factor behind the popularity of MGNREGS. As a result, MGNREGS has stopped in many states such as Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, due to technical glitches and poor Internet connectivity which plagued the attendance system leading to most of the labourers missed out of the attendance register.
The Sinha Committee and the Task Assigned
The central government appointed a committee, headed by the former rural development secretary, Amarjeet Sinha, in November 2022 to assess the efficacy of MGNREGS as a poverty alleviation tool. The committee has been given a time period of three months to submit its suggestions.
The committee has been tasked to study the various factors behind the demand for MGNREGA work, expenditure trends, and inter-state variations and the composition of work. The committee has to suggest what changes in focus and governance structures are required to make the MGNREGA more effective.
The committee would also look at the reasons for increase in cost for providing work since the scheme was first launched. The committee will review and recommend ways to bring in more focus on poorer areas. For instance, states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where there is higher level of poverty, have not been able to utilise the scheme optimally. Whilst states such as Kerala, which are economically better, have been utilising the MGNREGS for asset creation. Poorer states need MGNREGS more, but the government could not deny money to states like Kerala, due to the current programme structure.
The committee would also study if the composition of work taken up presently under the scheme should be changed. It would also review whether it should focus more on community-based assets or individual works.
About MGNREGA and MGNREGS
The MGNREGA was passed in 2005, and the demand-driven scheme guarantees 100 days of unskilled work per year for every rural household that wants it. There are currently 15.51 crore active workers enrolled under the scheme. MGNREGS was launched as a poverty alleviation instrument for the rural region by providing them with a safety net in the form of guaranteed work and wages.
The MGNREGA scheme has been criticised by critics for the lack of tangible asset creation.
By November 2022, Rs 59,420 crore have already been spent out of the Rs 73,000 crores, sanctioned for the scheme for the financial year 2022–23. So, the rural development ministry had requested the finance ministry for an additional sum of Rs 25,000 crore for the anticipated expenditure before end of the financial year 2022-23.
Despite all the criticisms, the MGNREGA acted as a crucial safety net during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019–20, the number of person-days work, provided under the scheme, was just 265 crores. However, in 2020–21, the number of person-days drastically increased to 389 crore. In 2021–22 as well, the demand for MGNREGA remained high at 365 crore person-days of work. A total of 11.37 crore households availed employment and a total of 289.24 crore person-days employment was generated till December 15, 2022. The demand for work has been exponentially increasing ever since the pandemic. For lakhs of people who lost their jobs, wages under the scheme were the only source of basic income security.
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