The Rural Development Ministry on Tuesday told the Lok Sabha that a total of 33.23 lakh job cards under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme had to be deleted in the last four months on various grounds, even as 1.14 crore more cards remain to be seeded with Aadhar numbers.
Commenting on the issue of unauthorized job cards, Rural Development Minister Giriraj Singh said the cards were deleted due to various reasons including, but not limited to, fraud. These reasons included the person not willing to work, relocation, and death.
The highest share of unseeded job cards is in Meghalaya at 70%, leaving 3,21,002 cards without any Aadhar linkage.
The government has, in recent years, tried to link MGNREGS beneficiaries to Aadhar-authenticated bank accounts in an effort to weed out fake cards and plug leakages in what is considered the world's largest employment guarantee scheme.
After Meghalaya was Assam with 17,539 workers at 43%, and Nagaland with 37.2% unseeded.
On the other extreme lay Andhra Pradesh, which has completed Aadhar seeding for nearly 98.3% of all job cards.
Home to the highest number of MGNREGS beneficiaries, Uttar Pradesh still has 9.4%, or 10.9 lakh, of its job cards yet to be Aadhaar-linked.
Other states with high unseeded Aadhar with job cards were West Bengal at 11% with 14,19,345 workers, and Odisha at 12.4% with 8,34,146 workers.
Wages for MGNREGS workers are paid directly to their bank accounts. Under a new system, the wages will be paid only to a bank account linked with Aadhaar.
The wage payment is done either using Aadhar-based payment bridge systems or National Automated Clearing House (NACH) depending upon the status of a beneficiary under Aadhar.