From Dhenkanal to Bellary, job cards get smart

SMART CARDS PART III

Farm workers swiping biometric cards to receive their daily wages is all set to become a reality in Orissa and Karnataka villages. Both states are ready to distribute smart cards to ensure transparency in the disbursal of social security pension and payment of wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme.

In Karnataka, about 600,000 beneficiaries will receive payments by swiping their cards in a project driven by the finance department, which is headed by Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa. It will be taken up through a pilot project in the Bellary, Chitradurga and Gulbarga districts of the state.

“We are interacting with the probable stakeholders and are working out the modalities. The pilot project will take off shortly,” principal secretary (e-governance) BL Sridhar told Business Standard.

In Orissa, the state will make payments under NREGS through banks or post offices from next month using biometric smart cards. Initially, the pilot will be run under five post offices in five districts — Bhadrakh, Dhenkanal, Baragarh, Ganjam and Puri. Block development officers will now credit wages against account numbers of job-card holders, which they can draw from the visiting postman who will carry a smart-card reader.

The full-fledged rollout is slated for December 2008 and the state government is talking to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd for connectivity.

Karnataka and Orissa have drawn inspiration from Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh where pilot projects on using smart cards for various other purposes like public distribution system and obtaining land records are currently going on.

Smart cards aid in tracking payments made to people who come under the NREGS, work-for-food and other government schemes.

These will minimise the scope for fraudulent activities like siphoning of funds by creating fake employment records. This is the biggest challenge the current government’s social inclusion schemes face. Though the sums allocated are huge, the money that reaches the actual beneficiaries is small.

The biometric card does away with officials in the disbursal of wages and thereby reduces corruption. These smart cards will have the name, age, address, digital photo and fingerprints of workers.

In the case of NREGS, a person’s details of the wages due, maintained by the respective gram panchayat, are uploaded to the database. “Just like a postman who delivers money orders, representatives of the bank which is entrusted with the task of fund disbursal will visit the villages with a smart-card reader,” Karnataka’s e-governance director, Vipin Singh, said. “All that the worker has to do to receive wages is to swipe his smart card on the reader. The details are immediately transferred to the central server and the database is updated.”

Singh added that the state will evolve a management information system to ensure that the bank representative has actually gone to the worker’s doorstep. “We are thinking of installing a tiny GPS device in the smart card readers,” he said. Banks which handle payments will be held responsible in disputes related to payments.