DINDIGUL: For the last three months, PSU banks have denied MGNREGA payments to 9,613 workers in Dindigul district, because of factors such as the lack of Aadhaar seeding and inaccuracies in account details.
There are 2.18 lakh households employed under the MGNREGA scheme in the district and payments are made once every 2-3 months.
K Palaniammal from Batlagundu said,”I was deployed for desilting of works in my village for the past several months. But, my payment was stopped after November 2024. In January, I reached the panchayat office and they claimed the payments were initiated from the Dindigul Office of District Rural Development Agency (DRDA). But I haven’t received any payments so far.”
DRDA officials which denied blocking of payments and claimed the issue would be with the bank.
“After the work allocation, field supervisors and block development officers calculate the works and payments, and details are passed to DRDA. After approval, we send the bank details of the workers to the respective banks. Currently, we have authorised more than 67,041 transactions in the past two weeks in Dindigul district alone. Currently, 458,211 transactions are pending and they will receive money in their accounts,” an official said.
A top official from Lead Bank (Dindigul) said, “There are many reasons for blocking payments to these workers. Firstly workers could have dormant or inoperative accounts. Secondly, many workers have mentioned wrong account details, besides some of them have mistakenly or deliberately closed their account. Besides, some accounts might have been blocked or frozen due to some reasons. The workers needn’t worry about the issue. They can directly go to any branch of PSU banks and seed the Aadhar or link the bank account with proof.”