Most technocratic
interventions introduced in MGNREGA appear to be designed to aid
administrators rather than for actually helping workers.
In
his 2017-18 Budget speech, finance minister Arun Jaitley asserted with
great conviction that the ruling dispensation’s “initiative to geo-tag
all MGNREGA assets” to put them “in public domain has established
greater transparency”.
In 2016-17, the rural development ministry
started an initiative called ‘GeoMGNREGA’, under which it was proposed
that all assets created under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural
Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) were to be tagged with their
respective geospatial locations. To a technologically-savvy individual
the online Management Information System (MIS) of MGNREGA, GeoMGNREGA –
as envisaged by the rural development ministry – will allow access to
photographs and geospatial locations for lakhs of MGNREGA assets
constructed across the country.
But is this idea – which sounds
quite impressive – actually helping in making the programme more
transparent for those who it affects the most – the workers employed
under this scheme?
The claim of “greater transparency” stands in
stark contrast with growing evidence from Jharkhand, of how the recent
technological interventions being imposed by the ministry of rural
development are making the programme more opaque and cumbersome for
workers.
Over the last few years, the implementation of MGNREGA
has progressively been linked with the MIS. Every process related to
providing employment and wages to workers, be it registering the demand
for work, allocating work, generating muster rolls for starting the
scheme, or issuing orders paying wages and material etc, has been linked
with the MIS through the real-time transaction-based electronic fund
management system (eFMS).
Even though measures for decentralised
planning, implementation and monitoring of the schemes are ingrained in
the MGNREGA, there is a growing tendency within the ministry to play
‘Big Brother’ and use the MIS to control the implementation of the
programme from New Delhi. It is no surprise that most technocratic
interventions introduced in MGNREGA over the last few years – electronic
muster rolls, eFMS, GeoMGNREGA – appear to be designed more for aiding
the administrators than for actually helping workers.
Ground
reports from Jharkhand suggest that these new technical systems are
disempowering workers and severely diluting transparency and
accountability in MGNREGA.
Please click here to read more.