Unpaid, delayed NREGA wages: Govt of India "fails" implementation despite SC order

India’s top civil societies network campaigning for the rural jobs guarantee scheme has claimed that despite the Supreme Court dated May 18 order to “prepare an urgent time bound mandatory program to make the payment of wages and compensation” to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the Government of India has refused to do it.
All that the Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, has done following the order, which was in response to a Swaraj Abhiyan Public Interest Litigation (PIL), is to organise a consultation on this matter on 27 June, in which no representative of the civil society was invited.
Pointing this out, the NREGA Sangharsh Samiti (NSS) said, “In a press release issued on 13 July 2018, the Ministry claimed that it is implementing Standard Operating Protocols (SOPs) for ensuring timely payment of wages”, regretting, however, “These protocols are unavailable in the public domain.”
NREGA workers are supposed to receive their wages within 15 days of doing the work, failing which they are entitled to compensation. There are two stages in the processing of wage payments.

The first stage comprises of all the steps to be completed within the state/Union Territory (UT), i.e. measurement of work, entry of workers’ attendance in the Management Information System, generation of wage list, generation of Fund Transfer Order (FTOs) and approval of FTOs by the first and second signatories.
The second stage includes generation and forwarding of fund release order by the Ministry of Rural Development, crediting of the state account with funds in the sponsor bank and crediting of wages in the worker’s account.

According to the NSS, there is “lack of uniformity in timelines for first stage processes across states”, noting, “As per the Ministry’s guidelines, FTOs should be approved by the second signatory within eight days of the closing date of the corresponding Muster Roll. This leaves a week for the completion of the second stage processes.”
“However”, asserted NSS, “As per the Ministry’s own data, only 11 states/UTs follow this rule. Other states allow their functionaries to complete the first stage processes till up to 15 days after the closing date of the corresponding Muster Roll. This subsequently delays the completion of the second stage processes.”
Claiming that the PIL forced the Ministry to admit that what it had been touting as the rate of timely payment of wages is in fact only the proportion of FTOs approved on time by the second signatory, NSS said, “The submissions made by the central government to the Court reveal that the rate of timely processing of wages in the second stage is very poor: only 17% in 2016-17 and 43% in 2017-18.”
“Currently, compensation is only calculated for the delays in the first stage of the wage payment processes”, NSS says, adding, “Further, Programme Officers have the untenable discretion of rejecting this compensation. It is thus a matter of little surprise that from 2013-14 to 2017-18, only 4% of the calculated compensation was approved. Further, only 61% of the approved compensation amount was actually paid to workers.”
According to NSS, “Scores of workers do not receive their wages at all. Amongst the various reasons for non-payment of wages, one is rejection of FTO transactions for technical reasons. In the last financial year, 2.4% of the total wage payments – amounting to about Rs 500 crore – were rejected across the country. The year before, the rate of rejection of wage payments was as high as 16%. There are no less than 206 reasons for rejection of wage payments!”
The reasons include says NSS, “closed/transferred/blocked” account, “no such account”, “network failure”, “invalid Aadhaar”, “Aadhaar not mapped” and also a residual category of “miscellaneous”. The Ministry has no document in the public domain which explains the reasons for wage payment rejection or the remedial action to be taken in each case of rejection.”

Comments

Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

Tracking a lost link: Soviet-era legacy of Gujarati translator Atul Sawani

The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members. As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Venkaiah Naidu. The most striking comment came from BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who stated : "When a train derailed in the 1950s, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned. On the same morality, I demand PM Modi, HM Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Naidu resign so that a free and fair inquiry can be held. All that Modi and his associates have been doing so far is gallivanting, which must stop." Amidst widespread mourning, some fringe elements sought to communalize the tragedy. One post ...

Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.

Search This Blog