Context: Persistent delays in MGNREGA payments are worsening pandemic precarity.
Significance of MGNREGA:
Acted as a shock absorber during the first wave of the pandemic: Its functioning hinges on sufficient budget allocation, reliable payment systems, and ease of access to wages.
Challenges faced by MGNREGA:
Reduced funding: Government of India (GoI) not only reduced the MGNREGA budget this year but also neglected it in subsequent relief measures post the second wave.
Delayed work: As per official data, only 26% of the transactions of the first quarter of this financial year were credited within the stipulated seven-day period by the GoI.
The GoI took 26 days on average to process the transactions in the second stage.
In a previously conducted study across ten states, we found that Stage 2 alone was taking more than 50 days.
These delays were completely unaccounted for as they were not reflected in the MGNREGA MIS.
India boasted 4,355 crore digital retail transactions in 2020- 21 as per RBI data. These are usually completed within a day, if not in a few minutes. In comparison, MGNREGA transactions, which are only 1.6 per cent in the volume of these, get routinely delayed.
Lack of feedback: The digital payments system of MGNREGA has been a laboratory of many experiments since 2012. However, no mechanism to solicit feedback from workers to evaluate the robustness of these systems has ever been created.