09/12/2020 Delayed payments to rejection: MGNREGS workers spend money to collect wages | Business Standard News respondents in Jharkhand and Rajasthan, who took more than three hours to access wages at CSPs and BCs. The multiple visits coupled with long hours taken at disbursement agencies imply that workers had to forego more work and wages to withdraw their dues. The MGNREGS wage rate for Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan at the time of the survey in 2018-19 was Rs 205, Rs 168 and Rs 192, respectively. This was revised to Rs 237, Rs 194 and Rs 220 in 2020-21. Systemic problems in rural banking a ecting MGNREGS payments After 2014-15, MGNREGS workers’ Aadhaar numbers were seeded with their job cards and bank accounts to transfer wages, with Aadhaar-based biometric authentication needed for withdrawals at some disbursement agencies, as mentioned. This created technical challenges for some workers in accessing wages, including missing names in muster rolls, mismatch of names in job cards and bank accounts or Aadhaar numbers, said Sunny Bhagat, an independent researcher who works on MGNREGS-related issues in Jharkhand. “In 2016, large numbers of Aadhaar linkages [to bank accounts] were made as per [Jharkhand] state government’s norms, which led to errors of such nature [mismatch of names],” Bhagat told IndiaSpend. Around one in three respondents in Rajasthan said they had faced di culty getting their Aadhaar number linked with their bank account, as did one in ve in Jharkhand and one in 14 in Andhra Pradesh. About 40% of CSP and BC users reported having faced biometric authentication failure at least once in the last ve transactions. Such banking-related hardships are not restricted to the three states surveyed by LibTech India. In 2018, all MGNREGS workers did not yet have bank accounts linked with their job cards, and less educated or less informed workers depended on “Banking Middlemen, to assist them to make a transaction in the bank or at the ATM kiosk”, the KEA report had noted. Privately-run Common Service Centres (CSCs) that provide online government services including banking for a fee across rural India, are also failing to deliver, according to a survey in Jharkhand, IndiaSpend reported in November 2019. CSCs tend to overcharge customers for services such as banking through Aadhaar-enabled payment systems, we reported. Here too, workers needed to make multiple visits due to biometric failure, lack of network connectivity and electricity. These problems with rural banking have not changed much since the LibTech India survey in 2018, and COVID-19 lockdown restrictions have only exacerbated the situation in banks that were already crowded, said Dhorajiwala. In 2014, a Reserve Bank of India-appointed committee had recommended that electronic payment access points be made available for all within 15-minutes’ walking distance by 2016. The “urgent need to increase bank branches in rural India” was also highlighted in the LibTech India report in 2018. Yet around 40% of Jan Dhan account holders could not access the government's COVID-19 relief, IndiaSpend reported in June, with limited access to banks in rural areas cited among the most common gaps in lastmile connectivity. Payment rejection and lack of accountability A total of Rs 7.19 lakh remained unpaid to 249 respondents (nearly Rs 2,900 per worker, on average) due to rejected payments at the time of the LibTech India survey. About 89% did not know the reason for rejection of their wage payments, and thus did not know how to rectify it. Without recti cation, however, future MGNREGS payments to these workers would continue to be rejected, according to the report. Workers must receive payments within 15 days of the closure of muster rolls under MGNREGS guidelines, but the process of resolving rejected wage payments is unclear and may take months to be xed, said the LibTech India report. Further, “the onus of identi cation of the problem and recti cation falls entirely on the worker for no fault of theirs”, said the survey report. Field functionaries such as Hide ˅ Close COVID-19 INDIA CASES: 9,735,850 assistants at the panchayat level and other MGNREGS eld sta “did not seem to have clarity about” rejections, the report added. In the ve years to July 2020, about Rs 4,800 crore worth of payments were rejected and about Rs 1,274 crore worth were still pending to be paid to all MGNREGS workers, the report noted. As of November 30, https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/delayed-payments-to-rejection-mgnregs-workers-spend-money-to-collect-wages-1201… 4/9