The Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS) has been accorded sufficient attention, mostly on account of the myriad issues plaguing it. This begs critical attention because the state, through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), is legally mandated to offer up to 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Additionally, there has been a notable increase this year in the budgetary allocation to MGNREGS to nearly ₹86,000 crore. Numerous commentators have pointed out challenges in the project of linking rural employment guarantees to digitised individual identification systems. These include Internet connectivity, fingerprint recognition issues, difficulties faced by the disabled, unrecorded working days, name duplication, lack of awareness, errors in linking, authentication, elimination of names, discrepancy in name spellings, and issues in seeding — mostly where the workers are little at fault. Research shows that there are more than 26 crore workers registered with MGNREGS. Of them, as many as 5.2 crore workers were deleted from the database in 2022-23. An article in The Hindu noted that 34.8% of job card holders remain ineligible for ABPS. Other commentators have laid bare how, for those who are enrolled, there are just too many faulty moving parts to the payment system.
Sidelining the beneficiaries
At the foundation of these drawbacks is the fact that workers have been placed at the mercy of technology, contrary to the idealised notion of them being its beneficiaries. As much as it urgently calls for attention to dimensions of technological infrastructure, we must introspect how the state conceives of and understands technology and the worker. Clearly, technology has taken precedence. Employment security seems less a priority and the worker seems even further down the scale.
