New electronic system to disburse MGNREGA payment

The e-FMS would help the authorities provide wages to the MGNREGA

An electronic fund management system, which would provide wages more swiftly to workers under the central government's rural jobs scheme MGNREGA, will be introduced across the country by December 1, officials said here Friday.

"The e-FMS (Electronic Fund Management System) would help the authorities provide wages to the MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) workers more promptly compared to the existing system," said Ritesh Saxena, a senior official in the union ministry of rural development.

"The e-FMS would make the entire monetary systems -- from allocation of funds by the union and state governments to the MGNREGA labourers -- transparent, hassle and error-free and paperless besides eliminating administrative delays," the official said at a workshop here.

Inaugurated by Tripura chief secretary Sanjay Kumar Panda, the one-day workshop was organised by the union rural development ministry to educate officials implementing MGNREGA in the northeastern states.

The pilot project of the e-FMS was implemented in four states - Karnataka, Odisha, Rajasthan and Gujarat. It was later implemented in Tripura and Assam, said Saxena.

He said the existing multiple level of fiscal management under MGNREGA would be simplified and made easier in the new system.

Around 28 crore workers of 13 crore households under 778,134 villages in 644 districts in India come under MGNREGA, enacted in 2005. It provides at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a year to each household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

Left-ruled Tripura provided 86.27 days of work under MGNREGA in 2012-13 fiscal, the highest in the country.

Quoting the performance report of the union rural development ministry, Tripura's Rural Development Minister Jitendra Chaudhury told reporters that the state has been providing the highest average employment for the past four years under MGNREGA.