Spike in NREGS payment delays, technical glitches, say workers
The NREGA Sangharsh Morcha said wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Job Guarantee Scheme have not kept pace with inflation
NEW DELHI: Delayed payments, largescale deletion of names of workers and frequent technical glitches in several states continue to hobble the country’s flagship rural job guarantee programme, the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, a coalition of several grassroots organisations, alleged on Thursday.
The coalition, which works with workers’ unions, also said wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Job Guarantee Scheme have not kept pace with inflation and demanded increasing daily wages to ₹800.
On December 3, in a written reply in Lok Sabha, Union rural development minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said ₹661.50 crore worth of fund transfer orders for wages payable to workers were pending to states in 2024-25 till November 11.
“The ministry has made concerted efforts to reduce delays in the payment of wages. A Standard Operating Procedure (SoP) on the timely payment process for direct payment into the account of beneficiaries was issued and its implementation by the States/ UTs is being monitored on a regular basis,” the minister said in his reply.
Briefing reporters, noted economist Jean Drèze, who works on NREGA, said: “Mostly, only fund transfer orders are generated on time but crediting of workers’ wages into their accounts are delayed by weeks and even months.”
The Centre has made an Aadhaar-based payment system mandatory, along with stringent “know your customer” conditions for eligible workers.
The MNREG Act 2005 mandates 100 days of guaranteed work to rural adults and payments are to be settled within 15 days of completion of work.
According to Chakradhar Buddha of Libtech India, a technology platform monitoring NREGA services, nearly 90 million job cards of workers have been deleted since 2022-23 due to Aadhaar mismatches and technical glitches, leading to deprivation of work. Up to 30% of all payments are delayed beyond 15 days, he said.
Workers now have to mark their attendance on a mobile app, which is a key hurdle because many daily wagers don’t have active data packs.
On Wednesday, minister Chouhan said the scheme had generated 1.23 billion person-days during the current financial year, till December 2 and ₹46,907 crore of central funds had been released.
Rejecting allegations of a cut in funds, Chouhan said schemes such as MNREGA were demand-based, and if the allocated budget fell short, additional funds were sought from the finance ministry based on state demands.
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