‘Cruel New Year Gift’, Says Congress as MGNREGA Wage Payment Through Aadhaar System Kickstarts
New Delhi: The Congress has condemned the linking of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act/Scheme (MGNREGA/S) to Aadhaar that takes off from Monday (January 1) and has called it a “cruel new year gift” to the country’s poor and marginalised.
The scheme guarantees 100 days of work to rural households.
The implementation of an Aadhaar-based payment system was made mandatory on January 30, 2023, and after five extensions for state governments to calibrate their databases, it is set to kickstart from Monday.
The system requires a worker’s bank account and job card to be linked with Aadhaar. The account must also be connected to the National Payments Corporation of India’s ‘mapper’.
According to data by LibTech India, a consortium of academics and activists, 7.6 crore job cards have been deleted from the system over the last 21 months.
In a statement on Monday, Congress MP and the party’s media and communication in-charge Jairam Ramesh said that the move was the “prime minister’s cruel new year gift to exclude crores of the poorest and marginalised Indians from earning a basic income.”
“There are in total 25.69 crore MGNREGA workers of whom 14.33 crore are considered as active workers. As on December 27, 34.8% of the total registered workers (8.9 crore) and 12.7% of active workers (1.8 crore) are still ineligible for ABPS. Despite many challenges highlighted by workers, practitioners, and researchers, in using ABPS for MGNREGA wage payments, the Modi government has continued with its destructive ‘experiments with technology'. This is the prime minister’s cruel new year gift to exclude crores of the poorest and marginalised Indians from earning a basic income,” he said.
Ramesh accused the Modi government of using technology as a weapon to exclude the people belonging to the marginalised community.
“The prime minister's well-known disdain for MGNREGA has translated into a slew of experiments designed to use technology as a weapon to exclude – such as the digital attendance (NMMS), ABPS, drone monitoring, and the proposed integration of facial recognition to NMMS. No due consultation or scientific piloting was done before unleashing these ‘experiments’ on crores of Indians,” he added.
The Congress reiterated its earlier demand that the Union government “should stop weaponising technology, especially Aadhaar, to deny the most vulnerable Indians their social welfare benefits, release delayed wage payments and implement open muster rolls and social audits to improve transparency.”
Despite its popularity, the job scheme has seen budget cuts in recent years. In the 2023 budget, the MGNREGS was allocated Rs 60,000 crore. Concerns have been raised that the allocation to the MGNREGS has declined by 33% as compared to the revised estimates of 2022-23.
The Wire has earlier reported that the centrally sponsored scheme has not had a performance audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) since 2013. CAG’s performance audits examine the extent to which an activity, programme, or organisation operates economically, efficiently, and effectively.
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