NEW DELHI: The New Year has brought fresh troubles for 30-year-old Sudhama Devi, who has been struggling to cope with the changes in the attendance pattern of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) which has become mandatory from 1st January.
A daily wage worker enrolled with NREGA in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur, Devi has been relentlessly fidgeting with her budget smartphone in the past ten days to understand the app-based attendance, which takes geo tagged and time-stamped photographs of workers twice a day.
According to a new directive issued by the ministry of rural development on December 23, it was compulsory for all work sites to capture attendance on the mobile app — National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS). The government says that the mechanism will stop pilferage and will check fake attendance on the muster rolls.
Devi, a mate (supervisor) of the worksite in her village Kharauna Dih, was unable to mark the attendance of around 300 workers for the past 10 days due to continuous glitches in the app, she tells this newspaper over phone. “The app requires me to take photographs in the morning between 9- 11 am and in the evening between 2-4 pm. But the app gets stuck halfway and it’s impossible to feed even a few pictures in the app,” she said.
Out of the 300 workers in our panchayat, only a small number have got their attendance so far. “Now that there is no physical muster roll, we stand to lose our daily wages,” she says. The scheme, which ensures rural families the right to 100 days of employment every year, has been a lifeline for Devi’s five member family including three children.
However, for thousands including Devi, the rural job scheme has hit roadblock in many states such as Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and UP with technical glitches and poor internet connectivity plaguing the attendance system. It is adding to the woes of the workers. Nikhil Dey, founding member of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, told this paper that workers in most states are adversely affected by the technological intervention.
LOSS OF LABOUR