On January 1, the Rural Development Ministry made Aadhaar-Based Payment Systems (ABPS) mandatory in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). This is after five deadline extensions by the Union government, disregarding several memorandums by workers to the Ministry to not make ABPS mandatory.
There are two modes of wage payments in MGNREGS: account-based and ABPS. For the first, wage transfers use the workers’ name, bank account number, and the IFSC code of the bank branch. For ABPS, a few steps are minimally needed. First, a worker’s Aadhaar number must be seeded with their job card, which means authenticating her job card details with the Aadhaar database. Authentication is successful only when all the details including spelling and gender in the job cards match with those in the Aadhaar database. Second, their Aadhaar must be linked to their bank account. Third, the Aadhaar number of each worker must be mapped correctly through their bank branch with a software mapper of the National Payments Corporation of India, which acts as a clearing house of ABPS. The Aadhaar number acts as the financial address and cash transferred gets deposited to the last Aadhaar-linked bank account. Incorrectness in any of the above steps for ABPS means that the worker is denied work, does not receive wages, or is not paid in their preferred account. Consequently, workers have to spend hundreds of rupees and lose several days of their livelihood to fix these technological glitches.
