As reported by The Wire, Union rural development minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan informed the Lok Sabha on Tuesday (December 9) that 4.57 crore MGNREGS job cards were deleted across the country between 2019–20 and 2024–25, even as 6.54 crore new job cards were added in the same period.

While such figures are, in principle, verifiable on the MGNREGA management information system (MIS), their scale and internal logic warrant careful scrutiny. In a system marked by repeated deletions, re-registrations and compliance-driven churn, headline totals alone are an unreliable guide to continuity of access on the ground. 

Amidst news on the scheme undergoing significant changes, this article, however, focuses on a more recent and distinct deletion wave that coincided with the mandating of Aadhaar-based e-KYC.

When the e-KYC drive began in early October this year, Narappa, a worker from rural Kurnool, in Andhra Pradesh, was in Raichur district of Karnataka with his family, picking cotton. Nearly 1,000 workers from his district had migrated during the same week the e-KYC process began.

When asked if he had completed e-KYC, he simply said: “I don’t know… and I can’t go back now. Whatever happens, happens.”

For workers like him, the deadline was not tight – it was impossible.

A deletion wave like no other

In just one month, over 27 lakh workers disappeared from India’s Mahatma Gandhi National  Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) rolls. This is one of the sharpest contractions in the programme’s history – not due to falling demand or budget cuts, but because of a compressed and inflexible digital mandate. 

The Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) made Aadhaar-based e-KYC mandatory for all workers from November 1, 2025. Each worker had to register on the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) attendance app, which captures a live photo and matches it with their Aadhaar image. In effect, nearly 27.6 crore registered workers were told to complete this process immediately.

MoRD has described e-KYC as “simple, reliable, accurate and efficient” – a one-minute task meant to reduce duplication and ensure that “genuine workers” continue receiving wage employment “without disruption”.

But what unfolded on the ground was very different.

MoRD’s own circulars show how sharply the timeline was compressed. On September 10, states were informed that e-KYC was now mandatory for job-card renewal. A second circular on September 26 extended the mandate to all workers, instructing states to begin registration immediately.

Let us look at the timelines for Aadhar based e-KYC in MGNREGA. 

September 2025

A pilot for Aadhaar-based e-KYC begins in all the states of the country.

October 2025

Registration takes place across the country. Workers must complete face authentication by October 31.

A 31-day window

From October 1-31, the entire rural workforce effectively had just 31 days to comply.

From November 1

NMMS attendance becomes accessible only to workers who completed e-KYC. Those without e-KYC are automatically locked out of work.

This meant millions of workers had to perform digital face authentication during peak migration season, in regions with weak connectivity, using an app notorious for authentication failures. 

Exclusions were immediate and widespread.

In response to a report on The Hindu highlighting the deletions, the MoRD issued a public statement on November 21 describing e-KYC as merely “facilitative.” However, the ministry’s own September circulars had clearly made e-KYC mandatory and directly linked it to marking attendance.

Not the first instance

A deletion wave of this magnitude has only one precedent: the 2022-23 Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS) transition, when crores of workers were removed without due process. 

Deletions rose 247% that year compared to the previous year.

The pattern is identical:

• a new Aadhaar-linked condition
• a tight deadline
• a deletion spike

The timing is too precise to be dismissed as coincidence. A detailed analysis of how the ABPS-linked deletions unfolded is available in an earlier article published in The Wire here. 

The scale of exclusion

Of 27.6 crore registered workers:

• 10.6 crore completed e-KYC
• 17 crore did not

Among 12.1 crore active workers:

• 7.3 crore completed e-KYC
• Nearly 40% risk exclusion

The sheer scale of non-completion shows the barrier was structural, not personal.

Between October 10-November 12, 27 lakh workers were deleted across India. States with the highest e-KYC completion – Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Telangana – saw the highest deletions, while states with lower completion, like Maharashtra, recorded fewer deletions. 

States with the highest e-KYC completion also saw the highest deletions because completion and deletion moved in tandem as compliance tools. In these states, frontline officials faced the strongest pressure to finish e-KYC within the 31-day window, and deletion became the quickest way to reduce pending cases and raise completion percentages. States that moved more slowly, like Maharashtra, showed lower deletions simply because they were not racing to demonstrate full compliance.

Although there are exceptions to this pattern, the overall alignment suggests that deletions functioned as an administrative tool to raise compliance figures rather than as a genuine clean-up of records.

The NMMS has quietly evolved from a photo-uploading app into a system that decides who can be marked present. When e-KYC is pending, attendance cannot be taken.

This means access to work hinges less on being physically present at the worksite and more on passing repeated digital checks – often impossible for workers in low-connectivity regions, or with outdated Aadhaar photos.

This shift has tightened the link between failed authentication and exclusion.

How the deletions actually happened

To understand the 2025 deletions, one must revisit the 2022-23 ABPS transition. Frontline officials faced complex Aadhaar compliance requirements and heavy pressure to show rapid progress. 

Many chose the easiest option: Delete workers with unresolved Aadhaar issues as every deletion instantly raised the district’s compliance percentage.

The same pattern appears in 2025, but under even greater pressure. In 2022-23, officials had nearly a full year to meet ABPS targets. In 2025, they had just one month to complete e-KYC for the entire active workforce.

Under these conditions, frontline officials once again resorted to the mechanism that works fastest in MIS dashboards: Delete the workers who cannot complete e-KYC in time.

Deletion became an administrative shortcut instead of a verification tool. These shortcuts were supposed to become impossible after the 2025 standard operating procedure (SOP) introduced formal safeguards against arbitrary deletions.

Why the SOP failed

The January 2025 SOP was created only after sustained CSO pressure, since the deletion process had never been clearly articulated or aligned with MIS workflows, leading to arbitrary and opaque removals in 2022–23 and 2023–24. Despite these safeguards, the same pattern has returned during the e-KYC rollout.

MoRD’s SOP on job card deletion mandates:

• a draft deletion list published 30 days in advance
• individual notices
• an objection window
• Gram Sabha scrutiny
• settlement of pending liabilities
• a 90-day appeal period

This is a 45-60 day-long process at the minimum. None of this is compatible with a 30-day e-KYC timeline, especially when NMMS attendance is blocked immediately for workers whose e-KYC is incomplete.

The SOP was effectively impossible to follow, and its safeguards collapsed.

SOP Violations and MoRD’s Silence
For the first six months of 2025-26, additions outnumbered deletions – indicating that the January SOP was functioning as intended. According to LibTech India’s national tracker on MGNREGA, while 11.2 lakh workers were deleted between April and September 2025, nearly 90 lakh workers were added to the rolls. The net increase during this period was 78.8 lakh workers.

But once the e-KYC drive began, deletions surged and the protection offered by the SOP effectively disappeared.

As The Wire has previously reported, the Union government has said that the responsibility for deletions lies with state governments. The ministry has also reiterated that “job card updation is routine.” The same explanation has now been extended to the e-KYC–linked deletions as well.

But routine updating cannot explain lakhs of deletions that align so closely with new digital mandates. The silence around these spikes suggests an administrative acceptance – even expectation – of deletion-driven compliance.

The MGNREGS used to be a statutory guarantee — not a conditional privilege. Yet, the Aadhaar e-KYC rollout triggered one of the most exclusionary episodes in the programme’s history.

This is not a routine update. It reflects a system where administrative compliance has overtaken legal rights. If India’s digital systems are to support such a scheme, they must be rooted in field realities, due process, and the constitutional promise of dignity and inclusion – not in authentication failures and deletion-driven compliance. Otherwise, technology will continue to quietly shrink India’s rural workforce, undermining the very guarantee the law was created to uphold.

Venkateswarlu Kuruva and Chakradhar Buddha are affiliated to LibTech India, a centre in CORD. Views are personal.

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