“When there are no consequences, you are incentivizing people to keep doing it,” he says. “They never seem to be conducting exercises or properly structured reviews of the new tool or app, learning lessons on how it can be made better for the future.”
Sanjay Sahni, an activist and former MGNREGA worker based in east India’s Bihar state, who stood for the local assembly in elections on a platform of tackling the issues in the program, says the state is deliberately undermining efforts to improve lives for marginalized people. “The government doesn’t want to empower the laborers,” he says. “Because if that happened, they would start questioning the government.
The problems caused by the rollout of the NMMS app have been compounded by another technological solution that has been imposed on workers in the MGNREGA program. At the end of January, the government declared that MGNREGA workers had to be paid through the Aadhaar Based Payments System , which is built on top of the government’s controversial Aadhaar biometric identification system.
When it announced the new policy in January, the government gave workers just two days’ notice to register for ABPS. After an outcry, they shifted the deadline to June 30. However, by the end of May, only 53 percent of the workers were “eligible for ABPS”—in other words, had successfully completed the registration process—according to the MGNREGA website. In absolute numbers, that means more than 120 million workers could lose access to payments.
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