The digital battle for employment guarantee

In January this year, some households of Jharkhand’s Palamu district had demanded employment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). They were not given work though they had not exhausted their annual entitlement of 100 days’ work. The frontline functionary had told the clueless workers “MIS nahi ho raha hai” (MIS not happening). It turned out that the Ministry of Rural Development put a check on the number of days of work demanded by a household in NREGASoft, the online Management of Information System (MIS) of the MGNREGA. For reasons best-known to those who design such digital platforms, the system automatically “adds” a seventh day for every six days of work demanded in a week. The families were not allocated work because their demand in that year had exceeded 100 days in accordance with the MIS.

This is just an example of how the dependence of the MGNREGA on technology has become a deterrent for workers. Earlier, the MIS was primarily a public repository of post facto details of implemented schemes. From 2012, the MGNREGA was linked to the MIS through the electronic fund management system (eFMS). 

All processes of the MGNREGA — registering workers, accepting demand for employment, allocating work, generating muster rolls, preparing payment advice based on the attendance, transferring wages to workers’ accounts, and so on — were digitised. The MIS became a real-time transaction-based system.
 

eFMS was followed by centralising funds. Till 2011, gram panchayats were given funds to implement the programme. Funds were gradually centralised at the district, state and, in 2016, national level. In the current system, once the electronic advice for payment, called fund transfer order (FTO), is approved digitally by the block or gram panchayat, it goes to the public fund management system (PFMS), an application of the central government used to manage the distribution of funds. It is only after the approval of the FTOs in the PFMS by the ministry that they are sent to a bank, which, then, is supposed to transfer wages to the workers’ accounts through the Aadhaar-based payment bridge. 

For states such as Jharkhand, which have poor digital infrastructure, internet connectivity and shortages of trained functionaries, a real-time transaction-based system is nothing short of an implementation nightmare.

A major stated objective of the eFMS was to reduce delays in wage payments. The ministry claims that wages are credited to workers’ accounts within a day of approval of FTOs by states. But it is far from what is happening.

A recent study (by Rajendran Narayanan, Sakina Dhorajiwala and Rajesh Golani), based on 3,603 gram panchayats of 10 states, found that, in 2017-18, at least 45 per cent of wages was delayed by an average of 25 days at the level of the PFMS or the central bank. Local officials in Jharkhand admit there is also a lack of uniformity in processing FTOs. If a worker receives timely wages for a particular muster roll, it is not certain that she will get it on time for the next work-week. 

Aadhaar-based transfers of wages have further enhanced the uncertainties of receiving timely payments. Wages of workers getting credited to other bank accounts or in the accounts of people linked to their Aadhaar are almost a daily phenomenon in Jharkhand. Also, several thousand workers remain unpaid in the state as more than 4 per cent of wage transactions of 2016-18 were rejected by the centralised system because of issues such as incorrect mapping of bank accounts with Unique Identity (UID) numbers, ‘invalid Aadhaar’, and so on. 

The woes run deeper because of the poor accountability of the local administration and absence of a functional system for redressing grievances. In the pre-eFMS era, workers could at least directly identify the persons and institutions responsible for the delays in their wages — frontline functionaries, gram panchayat mukhiya, block officials, or the local bank or post office branch. But now, it is difficult for the workers as they are ill-equipped for this digital struggle. 

The local administration can easily shrug off its responsibility and blame the MIS. At times, functionaries too are helpless because of tweaks in the MIS by the state or the ministry. In the past two years in Jharkhand, the state disabled the option to generate FTOs for material payments several times to ration the utilisation of inadequate funds.

Local officials have also found ways to fudge reports in the MIS, which often happens at the cost of workers’ entitlements. In 2016, in their bid to meet the target of constructing farm ponds, officials marked thousands of schemes in which wages still had to be paid or were incomplete as “closed” in the MIS. 

And this, without even informing the beneficiaries. It left a massive number of workers without wages as payments cannot be made once schemes are closed in the MIS.

After the Digital India clarion call, the dependence of the MGNREGA on technology grew further. Since 2017-18, the ministry, with much fanfare about using “space technology”, made it mandatory to geotag all schemes thrice — before starting work, after 30 per cent of expenditure, and after completion. As electronic muster rolls cannot be generated until a scheme is geotagged, implementing schemes is delayed in areas that have poor internet connectivity or in short-staffed blocks.

The Modi government claims that technocratic initiatives help to check leakage of funds. But large-scale embezzlements of funds unearthed in the recent social audits in Jharkhand indicate that technology alone may not be enough to check corruption. 
 

There is growing evidence that the MGNREGA is now reduced to a centralised technocratic programme with little focus on workers’ entitlements. It needs to be untangled from the web of technology and given back to the workers. The first step can be an assessment of the utility of the various technological interventions from the workers’ point of view.

The author works on social policy in Jharkhand