MGNREGA workers demand wage revision

Ranchi: The workers employed in scheduled districts under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) demonstrated outside the Raj Bhavan on Tuesday, demanding a revision and timely disbursement of the wages, besides a rollback of the online attendance system of workers.Organized under the Jharkhand NREGA Watch, the workers demanded that the Centre should revise the daily wage allotted to the beneficiaries of the scheme from Rs 200 to Rs 600. Claiming that there was an inordinate delay in the disbursement of wages current, they also stated that their wages should be disbursed within a fortnight. In addition to the Centre’s wage of Rs 200, the state government pays Rs 25 to the MGNREGA workers.Balram, a member of the Jharkhand MGNREGA Watch, said, “The national mobile monitoring system (NMMS) application made mandatory from January, is posing problems for the MGNREGS workers in rural Jharkhand. Most workers do not have smartphones and even if they do, there are issues with connectivity. Hence, they are forced to go to the work sites for photographs to register their attendance, some times days after finishing their work, which delays the payment due to them.”“Moreover, the Aadhaar-based payment system mandates the workers to have Aadhaar cards. We conducted a survey and found that almost 45% of the rural workforce, who have job cards, do not have Aadhaar cards. The governor, being the custodian of Schedule 5 areas, must intervene and immediately rollback the system,” he stressed.The Jharkhand NREGA Watch also criticised the Centre’s decision to slash the budgetary allocations for the scheme by 33% for the ongoing 2023-24 financial year. “This is the lowest allocation compared to the GDP (of the country) in history,” Manoj Bhaiya, a Latehar-based office bearer of the outfit, said.The outfit claimed that over 2.23 lakh job cards were deleted in the state between January and April. “The state government speaks of giving the labourers their rights but no work has been taken up in several villages for many months now,” it claimed.