'Though MGNREGA wages rose, workers got less'

Ongole: Workers under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) are not receiving more than the wages they received earlier, even though the government has increased notified wage per day, finds an analysis by an organisation.

LibTech India is a collective team of engineers, social workers, and social scientists, who are working as a team in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and other States for the last 10 years. The team prepared an analysis report on the implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which has a legal provision to provide 100 days of work on demand per registered rural household per year, or unemployment allowance if failed to provide work within 15 days and delay compensation if failed to pay wages within 15 days of working.

The team studied the data of past three economic years, 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 on expenditure and employment generated under MGNREGA in Andhra Pradesh. There are about 97.8 lakh job cards issued in the State, but only 55 lakhs of them are active and 99.8 lakhs of workers registered on them are seeking work. On average in 2021-22, each household has received only 51.6 person-days and the workers received Rs 216.2 as wage per day.

Andhra Pradesh spent Rs 10,900.6 crores under MGNREGA in 2020-21, which is the highest in the history of implementation of the scheme, but the expenditure reduced to Rs 7879.7 crores in 2021-22, even though wage rate is increased from Rs 237 in 2020-21 to Rs 245 in 2021-22. The year 2020-21, in which livelihoods were severely affected by Covid, is also the year that provided the highest person-days in last three years with 26 crores, while they are only 20 crores in pre-Covid 2019-20 and 24.2 crores in the still Covid impacted 2021-22.

After November 2021-22, MGNREGA system in Andhra Pradesh is forced to migrate to NIC software, as all other States did earlier. This change and implementation of new rules, and discontinuation of summer allowance have reduced Rs 449 crores in wages to workers. The incomplete migration of payment system from Aadhaar to Bank Account in NIC system is resulting in denial of work to workers, whose bank account details are not updated in the software. This has shown that there is a dip of 45% in the person-days generated post-migration to NIC software compared to last year, while change in earlier period is an increase of 1.4%. With the reintroduction of calculating wages based on muster attendance, the amount received by the worker is dropped by 11.8% to the notified wage. In 2020-21, workers received an average of Rs 228.74 for the notified wage of Rs 237, but due to the migration of software, the average wage is reduced to Rs 216.16 for the notified wage of Rs 245 and lost a total of Rs 496 crores in the State.

However, MGNREGA has acted as a lifeline and helped thousands of workers to earn a livelihood during corona pandemic and reversed migration situation. LibTech team members Chakradhar Buddha, Diwakar Mantri, Naveen Gajjalagari, Parul Saboo, Radhika Chaterjee and Venkata Krishna Kagga suggested that complete freedom should be given to States to design and implement the scheme within the legal boundaries and based on local conditions, to fulfil the employment guarantee promise given by the parliament.