Wage Payments Under MGNREGS Now Only Through Aadhaar-Based System

Wage payments under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme will now be done only through the Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS), sources said on Monday. The last extension of the deadline to state governments to make the payments mandatory through the system ended on Dec. 31.

The sources said it has been conveyed to states that payments will now be made only through the ABPS. If any state has any grievance, it will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, they said.

The ABPS uses the 12-digit Aadhaar number as a worker's financial address. For ABPS-enabled payments, a worker's Aadhaar details are seeded with their job card and the Aadhaar has to be linked to the worker's bank account.

There are around 14.28 crore active workers under the MGNREGS as per data on Jan. 1, according to the Aadhaar Demographic Verification Status Report on the website of the Union rural development ministry.

Aadhaar seeding has been done for 13.48 crore workers. While 12.90 crore workers' Aadhaar has been confirmed, around 12.49 crore workers have been converted to the Aadhaar-Based Payment System. This means around 12.5% of active workers under the MGNREGS are still not ABPS enabled.

When it comes to total workers, according to data on Jan. 1, there are about 25.89 crore workers under the MGNREGS, of which 17.37 crore are in the ABPS. This means over 32% workers are not eligible for ABPS.

An order was issued in January last year to make payments through the ABPS mandatory under the MGNREGS and the government had first fixed Feb. 1 as the deadline.

It, however, was extended many times throughout the last year. The deadline was first extended to March 31, then till June 30 and then Aug. 31. In August, the deadline was extended till Dec. 31.

The last extension was done as several states were lagging behind in linking Aadhaar numbers of workers, according to the sources.

The ABPS dashboard on the MGNREGS website states that 87.8% of the active workers are ABPS eligible, and over 1.5 crore are still to be ABPS enabled.

The dashboard also says the speed of 'Aadhaar enablement' is slow to meet the now already crossed deadline of Dec. 31.

According to researcher Laavanya Tamang, who is with LibTech India and the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, making ABPS mandatory without proper infrastructure being in place may lead to workers being excluded.

"Making ABPS mandatory can lead to exclusion of workers from the MGNREGS. It can possibly lead to deletion of cards when authentication does not succeed. When you make something mandatory when the bureaucracy is not ready, the infrastructure is not ready, people will lose out," Tamang said.

She added that while the government has maintained no one will be turned away from demanding work, it is not clear how it will happen.

A working paper published in August last year by LibTech had said making Aadhaar mandatory will put immense pressure on field staff to ensure compliance of workers with the ABPS architecture, and Aadhaar seeding with one's job card and bank account needs demographic authentication.

"When this demographic authentication fails due to technical reasons, there are reports that field officials resort to deleting job cards of such workers," the paper had said.

MGNREGS' job cards entailing over 5.48 crore workers have been deleted in 2022-23 a jump of 267% compared to last year, the rural development ministry had informed the Lok Sabha in the recently concluded Parliament's Winter session.

In a statement issued in August last year, when the last extension was made, the ministry had said states have been informed that beneficiaries who come for work should be requested to provide their Aadhaar number but will not be refused work on this basis.

If a beneficiary does not demand work, in such a case her/his status of eligibility for APBS does not affect the demand for work and job cards cannot be deleted on the basis of reason that the worker is not eligible for APBS, it had said.