Andhra Pradesh: NREGA workers hit hard as Centre delays payment of wages

Ongole: The Union government is making unacceptable delay in paying the wages to the workers under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

When compared with the data for a random sample of 1 per cent of panchayats in Andhra Pradesh, the Central government is found to be taking more than three times the time to process the fund transfer orders from the State in 2021-22 than in 2020-21.

According to the Section 3(3) of the MGNREG Act 2005, the workers are entitled to receive their wages within 15 days of the date of closure of the muster roll. As per the paragraph 29 of Schedule II of the same Act, they are also entitled to compensation at the rate of 0.05 of the unpaid wages per day of delay beyond the 16th of the closure of the muster roll. For making the NREGA payments, the State governments generate fund transfer orders (FTOs) digitally and send them to the Centre within 8 days, which is also called stage-I of the payments process. The Central government processes the FTOs within the next 7 days and completes the payment to the worker in a maximum of 15 days, which is also called stage-II.

The 13th report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Rural Development and other official documents reported that the delay compensation is not paid for the workers in Andhra Pradesh for the last three financial years, 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22. The data analysts at LibTech India conducted a study on the trend of payment of wages to the MGNREGA workers, considering 1 per cent of the village panchayats, 130 of the 12,956 panchayats. They considered the data of workers, FTOs generated and payments made as of August 10, 2021, available on the website of MGNREGS, run by the Government of Andhra Pradesh.

Chakradhar Buddha, director of LibTech India, explained that they have analysed 2.58 lakh transactions that were paid across the randomly selected 130 panchayats in the 13 districts of Andhra Pradesh. They observed that the workers are receiving the wages after an average of 29 days, as the Centre is taking an average of 26 days to process the payments. He said that in the sample they analysed, only 20 per cent of the payments were completed in the 15 daystime period, and about 3 per cent of the payments are pending even for more than 60 days. He observed that the time to generate FTOs by the State is steadily decreasing over the last three years, but the Centre is taking much time to process them. He explained that the State took an average of 7.97, 4.97 and 2.96 days respectively to generate FTOs in 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 respectively, but the Union government took an average of 26.92, 6.78 and 25.82 days to process them and pay the worker. He also said that they calculated the actual compensation due by the Union government to the workers in the State will be Rs 36 crore for 2019-20, Rs 12 crore for 2020-21 and Rs 26 crore between April and July 2021-22.

He said that at the time when rural India is ravaged by the second wave of Covid pandemic and ample budget is available, the Union government is taking thrice the time it took last year, which is really undermining the importance of the scheme.