The Union Rural Development Ministry must withdraw its order to discontinue manual attendance for Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) scheme work sites with more than 20 workers to replace it using a mobile phone-based application — National Mobile Monitoring Software (NMMS) for recording attendance, the Peoples Action For Employment Guarantee (PAEG), a group of academicians and activists working in the field, said.
PAEG, in a recent letter to Secretary Rural Development N.N. Sinha, said that the Ministry’s May 13 th order is a violation of the NREGA law and also flagged a series of technical and sociological issues with the app- including discouraging the women from being the supervisors or NREGA mates.
Section 15 – schedule 1 that lays down rules about the muster rolls, clearly says that the muster roll must be accessible to the workers on demand all days during all working hours. The availability of muster roll only digitally limits the access.
