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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | With Shifting Accountability on NREGA Payment Delays, Workers Continue to Be Denied Their Due -Rajendran Narayanan, Sakina Dhorajiwala and Rajesh Golani

With Shifting Accountability on NREGA Payment Delays, Workers Continue to Be Denied Their Due -Rajendran Narayanan, Sakina Dhorajiwala and Rajesh Golani

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published Published on Dec 5, 2017   modified Modified on Dec 5, 2017
-TheWire.in

Not only is the government failing to make timely payments, but the Centre’s definition of what constitutes a ‘delay’ is also flawed.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) guarantees 100 days of work in a year for every rural household that demands work. In the current financial year, over 152 crore person days of work has been generated through the programme. The Act mandates that every worker must receive their wages within 15 days of completion of a work week, failing which a delay compensation is to be paid at a rate of 0.05% per day of delay. Not only are there massive delays in payments but the Centre’s definition of what constitutes a ‘delay’ is flawed, leading to a vast under-accounting of compensation.

This article is a continuation of ‘Analysis of Payment Delays and Delay Compensation in NREGA: Findings Across Ten States for Financial Year 2016-17‘. In the current article, we present some findings of our analysis based on 4.5 million transactions in about 3,600 panchayats across ten states for the first two quarters of the current financial year. We randomly sampled ten panchayats per district per state.

Repercussions of delays in wage payments

The Department of Expenditure (Ministry of Finance) took cognisance of our research in August 2017 and issued an office memorandum acknowledging that the delays are calculated only until the funds transfer order (FTO) is generated at the block/panchayat level. The document indicated that the principal reasons for such delays were “infrastructural bottlenecks, (lack of) availability of funds and lack of administrative compliance”.

Ironically, the very next month the central government blocked funds for 19 states since many of them had not submitted audited reports to the Centre. The issue persisted and wages were delayed for several weeks before the payments finally began to trickle in. In this tussle between the Centre and states, it is the workers who continue to suffer. Notwithstanding the delay in payments, the government’s misrepresentation of the ‘delay’, means that the workers cannot even be compensated for the full extent of delays.

In FY 16-17, we found in our sample of over nine million transactions that merely 21% wages were paid in the stipulated 15-day period. Contrary to the government claims of 85% payments made on time in this financial year, the analysis of our sample indicates that only 32% wage payments have been made on time. This year some wage payments have been pending for over 200 days. In such a scenario, it is not only the worker (whose wage is delayed) who is impacted but also others in the village due to loss of faith in the programme.

Wage payment process

Step one: Under the national electronic fund management system (NeFMS), an FTO is generated at the block/panchayat level on completion of the work week.

Step two: Subsequently, the Centre approves the FTO digitally and the payment is processed electronically. After passing through a notional state government bank account the wage is directly transferred to the individual worker’s account.

Broadly, step one is the individual state’s responsibility and step two is the Centre’s responsibility. Currently, the second step is not being considered as ‘delay’ in the MGNREGA management information system (MIS) thus absolving the central government and the payment agencies of any delays in labour wage disbursal by them.

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TheWire.in, 5 December, 2017, https://thewire.in/201818/nrega-payment-delay/


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