SMS boost to NREGS projects

KOLKATA: Muriganga Gram Panchayat employee Bishwapaty Gayne was used to travelling 17 km to the Sagar block office, delivering reports of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) projects under his jurisdiction. Since March this year, though, he has been filing his reports on his mobile phone and dispatching them via SMS.
Gayne is one amongst the numerous beneficiaries of a new state panchayat and rural development (PRD) department project that has introduced mobile telephony into the NREGS.
By enabling NREGS personnel at the panchayat level and above to register data on workers' daily assistance and wage disbursals via SMS, the PRD department is on the threshold of unleashing a possible revolution that could change the face of rural employment in Bengal.
"One of the biggest problems of NREGS was that critical information about the attendance of workers, progress of a project and wage payment weren't being relayed on time. By using mobile technology, we are enabling field supervisors and panchayat employees to send live data on a daily basis that is then uploaded on a publicly available website," Rajesh Kankaria, head of the projects' technology enabler SMSLive said.
The PRD department, along with the tech firm, had entered into a pilot project starting in February across five blocks of the state to test the feasibility of the concept. In addition to setting up a base server and other basic infrastructure at a cost of Rs 15 lakh, 11,000 mobile phones were distributed across the project area.
Consequently, the lives of NREGS personnel like Gayne have become substantially simpler. "Before I was given the mobile phone, travelling 17 km to the local block office was a regular affair. Now, I can file the reports from the actual site or from my office. Not only is the information instantly dispatched, it makes the payment process much simpler as the accounts are readily available to all parties," Gayne told TOI from Muriganga.
Not only does this new technology allow for quicker transactions, it also ensures that NREGS workers many of whom have a hand-to-mouth existence can be paid on time.
"Despite the official guidelines, part-payment to workers is mostly untenable as precise measurements of a project need to be relayed before the wages are paid. In the past, the process could take up to a month. But now, with data moving quicker, workers can be paid in under 20 days. This is a big achievement," Shivshankar Maity of Dhablat village said.
Though the pilot project is yet to be implemented state-wide, the PRD department is also looking at utilizing the mobile platform for other schemes.