Plug leakages

Malpractices under MGNREGA must be addressed

Prima facie, it is hard to find fault with the government’s order to make all payments to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) beneficiaries via Aadhaar-linked bank accounts and also to record the presence of the workers through the mobile phone application-based attendance system. These measures are meant, evidently, to ensure that the payments go to the genuine workers, diminishing the scope for misappropriation of funds through fraudulent means like fake enrolment of workers. However, the fact that can also not be disregarded is this move can cause some inconvenience to those whose bank accounts are not seeded with Aadhaar. This is why some civil right activists and MGNREGA workers are contesting this rule. Going by their reckoning, 57 per cent MGNREGA job-card holders would become ineligible to receive their wages.

This issue can, however, be addressed by giving adequate time to the workers to get their accounts seeded with Aadhaar, which they, in any case, would need to do, sooner or later, under the banks’ “know your customer” obligations. But the rampant corruption in the implementation of this flagship poverty alleviation programme cannot be allowed to continue unchecked. Several studies and even the parliamentary standing committee attached to the rural development ministry have affirmed that the MGNREGA is riddled with malpractices like fake job cards, widespread corruption, late uploading of muster rolls and huge pendency of payments for wages and materials. Well-judged anti-corruption measures are, therefore, necessary to curb these ills. It would be far-fetched to view this exercise as the government’s ploy to reduce the number of job-seekers to save on MGNREGA expenditure.
 

However, what is often not appreciated is that the MGNREGA is not a regular employment-generation programme but is only a fall-back mechanism for those who cannot find any other job. The MGNREGA (2005) makes it amply clear that it is a demand-driven scheme to guarantee 100 days of unskilled work per year for any rural household that wants it. Though over 155 million workers are enrolled under it, only a fraction of them actually seek the work at a given time. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that it proved a crucial safety net during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the demand for employment suddenly shot up due to mass reverse migration of labour.
 

Regrettably, the potential of the MGNREGA to create durable assets in rural areas has not been adequately capitalised. A government-appointed committee that went into the working of this scheme has reported that only a few states, especially the economically better-off ones like Kerala, have managed to utilise this scheme for building need-based assets. Most others, particularly the backward states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, have failed to do so. Surprisingly, even as this critical lapse continues to elude due attention, the rural development ministry has begun talking about passing on a part of the financial burden of running this programme to the states. Given the dismal record of other Central schemes which involve cost sharing with the states, including the crop insurance scheme, such a move can spell doom for the MGNREGA as well. This scheme should, therefore, remain a wholly centrally funded programme to serve its intended objective of poverty alleviation.