Aadhaar Mgnrega Labour: Till now Aadhaar of 13.48 crore workers has been linked. Aadhaar verification of 12.90 crore workers has been done, about 12.49 crore workers have been converted to Aadhaar-based payment system.
New Delhi. Salary payments under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGA) will now be made only through the Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS). PTI gave this information on Monday quoting its sources. The deadline for state governments to make payments through the system mandatory has ended on December 31. Sources said that the states have been informed that the payment will now be made only through ABPS. He said that if any state has any complaint, it will be resolved on a case-by-case basis.
ABPS uses the 12-digit Aadhaar number as the financial address of the worker. For ABPS-enabled payments, a worker’s Aadhaar details are linked with his job card and Aadhaar must be linked to the worker’s bank account. According to the Aadhaar Demographic Verification Status Report on the website of the Union Rural Development Ministry, as of January 1, there are about 14.28 crore active workers under MNREGA.
So far, Aadhar numbers of 13.48 crore workers have been linked. Aadhaar verification of 12.90 crore workers has been done, about 12.49 crore workers have been converted to Aadhaar-based payment system. This means that about 12.5 percent of the active workers under MNREGA are still not ABPS capable. When it comes to total workers, as per January 1 data, there are around 25.89 crore workers under MNREGA, of which 17.37 crore are in ABPS. This means that more than 32 percent workers are not eligible for ABPS.
An order was issued in January last year to make payment through ABPS mandatory under MNREGA and the government had earlier set a deadline of February 1. However, it was extended several times in the last year. The deadline was first extended to 31 March, then to 30 June and then to 31 August. In August the deadline was extended to December 31.
According to sources, the last extension in the deadline was done because many states were lagging behind in adding the Aadhaar number of workers. On the ABPS ‘dashboard’ on the MNREGA website, it is said that 87.8 per cent of the active workers are ABPS eligible and more than 1.5 crore are still to be enabled for ABPS. It also said on the dashboard that the pace of making ‘Aadhaar enabled’ is slow to meet the December 31 deadline.
According to Lavanya Tamang, a researcher associated with ‘Libtech India’ and ‘NREGA Sangharsh Morcha’, making ABPS mandatory without proper infrastructure could lead to workers opting out of MNREGA. Tamang said, “Making ABPS mandatory may exclude workers from MNREGA. Cards may potentially be removed if verification is not successful. “When you make something mandatory, when the bureaucracy is not ready, the infrastructure is not ready, then people will suffer.”
He said that although the government has said that no one will be stopped from seeking work, it is not clear how this will happen. A ‘working paper’ published by ‘Libtech’ in August last year had said that making Aadhaar mandatory would put immense pressure on field workers to ensure workers’ compliance with the ABPS structure and would put pressure on one’s job card and bank account. Linking Aadhaar with the account requires demographic authentication.
“When this demographic verification fails due to technical reasons, there are reports that regional authorities remove the job cards of such workers,” the ‘working paper’ said. The Ministry of Rural Development had informed the Lok Sabha in the recently concluded winter session of Parliament that the MNREGA job cards of more than 5.48 crore workers have been removed in 2022-23. This is 267 percent more than last year.
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