- Prelims: Current events of national importance(Different social service Schemes,MGNREGA, SC/ST etc)
- Mains GS Paper II & III: Social empowerment, schemes for vulnerable sections, development and management of social sectors/services.
ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS
- The Rural Development Ministry made Aadhaar-Based Payment Systems (ABPS) mandatory in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).
INSIGHTS ON THE ISSUE
Context
MGNREGA:
- The scheme was introduced as a social measure that guarantees “the right to work”.
- The local government will have to legally provide at least 100 days of wage employment in rural India to enhance their quality of life.
- The Ministry of Rural Development (MRD), Govt of India is monitoring the entire implementation of this scheme in association with state governments.
- Within 15 days of submitting the application or from the day work is demanded, wage employment will be provided to the applicant.
- Right to get unemployment allowance in case employment is not provided within fifteen days of submitting the application or from the date when work is sought.
- Social Audit of MGNREGA works is mandatory, which lends to accountability and transparency.
- The Gram Sabha is the principal forum for wage seekers to raise their voices and make demands.
- The Gram Sabha and the Gram Panchayat approve the shelf of works under MGNREGA and fix their priority.
Features of Scheme:
Issues with MGNREGA:
- Poorer States struggle more to adapt when compared to those that are better off because of weaker administrative capacity.
- Programme’s “regressive” spending pattern, where poorer States spend less NREGA funds than better-off ones.
- Its most basic design principles have been forgotten or wilfully ignored.
- The process of wage payments created by the central government has become even more convoluted.
- For example: seven or more functionaries have to sign off before payment due to a worker can be approved (stage one of the wage payment cycle).
- Intermittent and unpredictable fund releases by the central government are one of the fundamental reasons why State governments are unable to ensure the full potential of NREGA.
- Inadequate funds, typically discourage and often deny demand for work.
- Worksites are not opened on time, and the work provided does not match demand.
- Majority of reforms have focused on centralisation such as the electronic fund management system, geo-tagging of assets and a national mobile monitoring system (NMMS)
- They have disrupted implementation.
Modes of wage payments in MGNREGS:
- Account-based: wage transfers use the workers’ name, bank account number, and the IFSC code of the bank branch.
- ABPS: First, a worker’s Aadhaar number must be seeded with their job card,
- which means authenticating her job card details with the Aadhaar database.
- Authentication is successful only when all the details including spelling and gender in the job cards match with those in the Aadhaar database.
- Their Aadhaar must be linked to their bank account.
- The Aadhaar number of each worker must be mapped correctly through their bank branch with a software mapper of the National Payments Corporation of India, which acts as a clearing house of ABPS.
- The Aadhaar number acts as the financial address and cash transferred gets deposited to the last Aadhaar-linked bank account.
Issues with ABPS:
- Incorrectness in any steps for ABPS means that the worker is denied work, does not receive wages, or is not paid in their preferred account.
- Workers have to spend hundreds of rupees and lose several days of their livelihood to fix these technological glitches.
- Research papers in Economic and Political: It shows that officials have resorted to deleting job cards owing to pressure from the Union government to meet 100% of the Aadhaar seeding targets.
- Since different administrative units are involved in creating different documents in rural areas, spelling mismatches are common.
- UIDAI has certified that only the biometrics are correctly captured while the demographic details are left to the discretion of local officials.
- In the Lok Sabha, the Rural Development Ministry reported that there was a 247% increase in job card deletions in FY 2022–23 compared to previous years.
- In the last two years alone, job cards of over 7 crore workers got deleted.
- As per the government data(January 2024): out of a total of 6 crore registered workers, only 16.9 crore workers are eligible for ABPS while all workers are eligible for account-based payments.
- LibTech: It claims that there “is no significant gain with ABPS vis-à-vis bank account payments and it is just 3% more in case of ABPS
Benefits of ABPS:
- It removes duplicate job cards
- It reduces wage payment delays
- It has lower payment rejections.
Way Forward
- Timely payments is a function of the government allocating adequate funds.
- With adequate funds, the time taken to pay workers will not be different whether it uses ABPS or account-based payments.
- The difficulties in resolving problems with ABPS far outweigh the difficulties in resolving problems with account-based payments and so we advocate for account-based payments.
- States which are spending more are implementing the programme better because they have better capacities (as several studies including the government’s own Economic Survey concluded in 2016).
- For a universal, demand-based social security programme such as NREGA, reforms cannot be based on targeting better.
- There has to be a focus on exclusion and not inclusion “errors”.
- Given the financial needs of this programme: The General Financial Rules need to be reimagined so that budgetary allocations remain flexible to the need for funds by States in response to demands for work.
- Reforms to NREGA must prioritize the access of workers to entitlements with ease and dignity, rather than focus on administrative and fiscal efficacy alone.
QUESTION FOR PRACTICE
Besides the welfare schemes, India needs deft management of inflation and unemployment to serve the poor and the underprivileged sections of the society. Discuss.(UPSC 2022) (200 WORDS, 10 MARKS)
