Centre to exempt Aadhaar-payment to MGNREGA workers in some cases

Work demand drops for a second month in Dec

The Centre on Monday said it would give specific exemptions from an Aadhaar-linked payment to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) workers, a day after it was criticised by the Congress for “weapo­nising technology” to deny the most vulnerable Indians their social welfare benefits.
 

Wage payments under the MGNREGA scheme will be paid only through the Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS) after the fifth extension of the deadline for Aadhaar seeding expired on December 31. The system requires a worker’s bank account and job card to be linked with Aadhaar.

Reacting to claims that scores of eligible workers would fall out of the MGNREGA net, an official explanation said Aadhaar seeding was done to avoid duplication, identify the genuine beneficiaries and to make the benefits of the social welfare schemes available only to them. 
 

The Centre said it decided to make the wage payment of unskilled workers through ABPS mandatory to ensure the payment goes directly into the bank accounts of the beneficiaries, even in case of frequent change of bank accounts.

The website showed that work demand under the scheme continued to fall in December for a second consecutive month in this financial year. In December, according to the provisional data sourced from the website around 19.96 million households sought work under the programme, which was 5.72 per cent less than the same month of last year.