JAIPUR: Across the country, payments worth Rs 9,124 crore are yet to be paid for work done in the 2016-17 financial year under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). This comes at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi has created incentive schemes for rewarding those using the digital payment platform. Only days ago, 20-year-old Maharashtra student Shradha Mengshette was surprised to win Rs1 crore as reward for buying a mobile phone worth Rs1,500 using the cashless mode.
PM Modi, however, has no such pleasant surprises for those who have toiled to make ends meet in India’s villages. Material suppliers under MGNREGA are owed the bulk of pending payments, 63%, according to the MGNREGA website accessed on April 16; 35% is owed to workers as wages; the remaining 2% is for administrative expenses.
The most important reason for this delay in payment is failure by the government to complete tasks required for making payments — generation of wage-lists and Fund Transfer Orders (FTOs). Some FTOs were rejected for technical errors, for instance wrong entry of workers’/vendors’ account details in the MGNREGA Management Information System (MIS). Some FTOs were not processed by the Public Finance Management System (PFMS), an online application of the Centre through which several social security payments are now routed.
Workers who do not get wages in 15 days of finishing work are entitled to a meagre compensation at 0.05% of pending wages per day of the delay. However, only 2.5% of the Rs. 411.72 crore of compensation due for delayed payments in 2016-17 was actually paid.
The primary reason for non-payment of compensation is untenable discretion given to the nodal district-level MGNREGA functionary, the programme officer, for "rejecting" compensation amounts calculated automatically by the MIS. The officer is not bound even to offer a reason for rejection.
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