45% MGNREGA workers make multiple bank visits to withdraw wages: Survey

The study estimated that the average cost incurred by a MGNREGA worker to visit post offices is the lowest at Rs 6, while a bank visit costs Rs 31, and Rs 67 for an ATM visit

Even as the Centre has tried to quicken wage payments under the flagship programme of MGNREGA, a survey has found that almost 45 per cent of the respondents, primarily poor casual labourers, had to make multiple visits to a bank to get their last withdrawal.

Forty per cent of respondents who used customer service points or banking correspondents to withdraw their wages had to make multiple visits due to biometric failures that happened at least once in their last 5 transactions.

The survey was conducted by LibTech India among 1,947 MGNREGA workers in Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Jharkhand between September and November 2018 to assess the hurdles that workers face in accessing their wages after they have been credited is what is referred to as ‘last-mile challenges.’ It was released today.

The survey has been supported by the Research Centre at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.

LibTech India is a group of social scientists, activists, engineers and data scientists who have been working on various aspects of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) across several states for the past decade.

“Rural banks tend to get very crowded. This, in combination with banks being located far away from panchayats, implies that on many occasions, MGNREGA workers have to make multiple trips to withdraw their wages. Since many users had to make multiple visits for a single withdrawal, the time and costs increase based on the number of such visits,” the report said.

 

The survey estimated that the average cost incurred by a MGNREGA worker to visit post offices to withdraw wages in the three states of AP, Rajasthan and Jharkhand is the lowest at Rs 6, while in comparison it costs Rs 31 to visit a bank, Rs 11 for a CSP/BC and Rs 67 for an ATM.

The survey also found that awareness about banking norms and rights was overall very low among MGNREGA workers.

For example, the survey found that nearly 75 per cent of all the respondents did not know if they could transact in any bank branch and they even didn’t have reliable information on wage credit.

It also found that around 36 per cent of the workers needed to visit the bank to find out about wage credit and about a quarter of them were misinformed about wage credit and so had to make multiple visits just to find out if their wages had come.

Because of all this anomalies, the survey said that official figures show that as of July 2020, in the last five years, about Rs 4,800 crore worth of payments were rejected and about Rs 1,274 crore worth is still pending to be paid to MGNREGA workers.