After launching the electronic fund management system (eFMS) in all the districts in November last year for timely payment of wages to the labourers under MGNREGS, the State Government is planning to use SMS (short message service) to alert the beneficiaries about credit of their wages into their accounts.
The Panchayati Raj Department has asked the district collectors to ensure entry of mobile numbers of the MGNREGS workers in the NAREGASoft, a software developed exclusively by the National Informatics Centre for online credit of wages into the account of the wage earners.“You are requested to ensure that mobile numbers of MGNREGS workers are registered in the bank where their accounts are being maintained so that the alert on credit of wages into their accounts can be sent through SMS,” said Panchayati Raj Secretary DK Singh in a circular to the collectors. Singh requested the Collectors to do the job in mission mode to enable the Department to launch the e-governance service for timely payment to the workers.Since the NAREGASoft has no scope to edit or update mobile numbers of the registered workers against their bank or postal accounts, Singh wrote to the Ministry of Rural Development to make necessary changes in the software for revising the mobile numbers and deleting the frozen accounts.
The objective of eFMS is timely payment of wages to labourers in a most transparent manner, official sources said.The broad objective of eFMS is to enable online fund transfer from a central fund positioned at the State Headquarters to block and panchayat levels. It would reduce the related file maintenance, correspondence and delays in the transfer of funds to the field level, the sources said.
The new system would also minimise the corrupt practices like diversion and parking of funds in other accounts and enable automatic generation of accounts at each level for each transaction thereby facilitating a better decision.Besides, drawing of funds was based on the actual need after the work execution as per the norms and the system would eliminate instances of forgery and fraudulent drawing of money through bank cheques, the sources said.