
To
Smt NirmalaSitharaman
Union Finance Minister
Dear Smt Sitharaman,
More than a year ago, in my letter of 3rd July 2023, I cautioned your Ministry on last-mile glitches, largely attributable to beneficiary bank accounts linked to their Aadhar cards, that resulted in beneficiaries not receiving amounts intended to be conveyed through direct bank transfer (DBS) under more than 314 Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSSs), which have unduly proliferated during the last ten years, requesting your Ministry to take corrective steps. Evidently, neither your Ministry nor others concerned have acted on my letter.
The official MGNREGA website (https://nrega.nic.in/MGNREGA_new/Nrega_home.aspx) proudly displays that there are 13.19 crores of “active” rural workers employed under the scheme, 165.44 crores of person-days of employment created and 4.62 crores of rural households benefitted. How far do those figures correspond to reality?
An NGO, LibTech, conducted systematic ground-level surveys and found (https://libtech.in/data-point/) that Over 39 lakh registered workers were deleted from the MGNREGS between April and September 2024. The report also revealed that more than eight crore workers were removed from the MGNREGA registry during the financial years 2022-23 and 2023-24, largely as result of insistence on ABPS.
The Central Ministries should know that in rural areas, Aadhar cards often carry owners’ names in English erroneously translated from regional languages leading to computer mismatches, where, additionally, connectivity is poor and there are other computer-related glitches that either delay payments or exclude beneficiaries altogether from MGNREGS and other schemes. MGNREGA workers lose time and wages in going to and from banks to resolve their problems, causing them great loss. Had the intended amounts been delivered to them at their door-step, as in some States, most of those worries would have been resolved.
There are also issues revolving around the necessity for the Centre to respect federalism. Had the Centre refrained from excessive use of Article 282 of the Constitution to transfer benefits directly under CSSs to beneficiaries, bypassing the States, reducing the political space of the States, the latter would have introduced innovative ways to formulate schemes locally more relevant and more effectively implemented.Exclusion of as many beneficiaries as eight crore workers from the MGNREGS register during 2022-23 and 2023-24 and 39 lakh beneficiaries during April-September 2024 alone is far too serious a matter that can be ignored by any responsible government. For the concerned Ministry to remain totally insulated from knowing about such a harsh ground reality, shows that they have failed to put in place the required independent feedback systems to understand and appreciate field-level problems. I hope they contact LibTech at least now, which has conducted the latest survey.
May I appeal to the government to address the problem of exclusion caused by ABPS as an immediate requirement and also reduce the number of CSSs and transfer the released funds to be devolved to States as per the rule-based allocation pattern determined by the Finance Commission?
Regards,
EASSarma
Former Secretary to the Government of India
Visakhapatnam