More than five crore job cards under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) were cancelled in the financial year 2022-23, the Union government told the Lok Sabha on Tuesday. West Bengal with 83.36 lakh saw the highest number of deletion of names from the scheme.
Groundxero | 25th July, 2023
On 25 July, 2023, the Union Rural Development Minister, Giriraj Singh, in a written response to a question by Congress MPs, informed the Lok Sabha that 5.18 crore names of workers were deleted from the MGNREGA list in FY 2022-23, as against 1.49 crore in FY 2021-22. This means a massive hike of 247 per cent in the deletions during the financial year 2022-23 as compared to 2021-22.
The minister cited death of workers, fake and duplicate job cards, people not willing to work anymore or family shifted from Gram Panchayat permanently as the reasons for deletion of the names. In reply to another question, Singh said 2.95 crore people in the age group of 18-30 years were registered under the scheme up to the 2020-21 financial year which was increased to 3.06 crore up to financial year 2022-23. In 2022-23, 57.43 percent of MGNREGA workers were women.
West Bengal (83.36 lakh) saw the highest number of name deletions in 2022-23, followed by Andhra Pradesh (78.05 lakh), Odisha (77.78 lakh), Bihar (76.68 lakh) and Uttar Pradesh (62.98 lakh). In 2021-22, 1, 57, 309 job cards were deleted in West Bengal, the number shot up by over 5,000 per cent as 83,36,115 job cards were deleted in the year 2022-23.
Under the MGNREGA scheme, every eligible rural household is given a job card which entitles its willing adult member to 100 days of guaranteed work in a year. The deletion of name from the muster rolls means that the person is ineligible to work as he is no longer registered under the rural job programme.
The Union government has made online attendance through the National Mobile Monitoring System mandatory for MGNREGA workers and it is also pushing for an Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS) for settling MGNREGA wages. Activists have been opposing this and have been of the view that, in many cases, workers’ names could have been deleted because the job card was not linked to the ABPS. But the minister ruled out ‘system error’ as the reason for the deletion of names.
On the payment of the wage component by the Union Government to the states, Minister of State for Rural Development Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti stated: “An amount of Rs 2,765.55 crore is pending for wage component in respect of state of West Bengal under NREGA as on 21.07.2023.” The West Bengal and the Union governments are at loggerheads after the latter invoked Section 27 of the Act to stop funds for MGNREGA from December 2021 over alleged violation of rules in the implementation of the scheme in the state.
One in every 10 NREGA workers in India or 1.36 crore active NREGA job card holders are from West Bengal. Taking one job card per family, this means 6.8 crores or about 60 percent of the West Bengal population uses NREGA as a source of income or as supplementary income. Almost all NREGA work has been stopped in the state since mid-2022 with wages to the extent of Rs 2800 crores remaining unpaid to the workers. The last Fund Transfer Order (FTO) was paid by the Government of India on 16th December 2021 and since then no wages have been paid to the workers.
Image Courtesy : The India Forum