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NREGA / Right to Work | Sole district to walk tech talk-Santosh K Kiro

Sole district to walk tech talk-Santosh K Kiro

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published Published on Jul 25, 2013   modified Modified on Jul 25, 2013
-The Telegraph


Ranchi district has an e-governance milestone that MGNREGS policymakers in the rest of India can emulate.

According to officials, Ranchi has become the state's first district to pay MGNREGS beneficiaries through electronic fund management system (e-fms) in all its 18 blocks.

The district, which bagged two prestigious e-governance awards in the course of a month, has again convincingly proved its mettle in an area that has proved to be the most contentious in the success - or rather transparency - of the UPA's flagship rural job scheme across the country.

Cash and cheque payments to MGNREGS beneficiaries opened a can of worms across India - middlemen embezzling funds, account books being fudged, cheques being forged, ghost workers being inducted for non-existent schemes.

In Jharkhand's Latehar, MGNREGS activist Niyamat Ansari was killed in March 2011 for blowing the whistle on fudging of funds in his area.

But e-fms, an automated system introduced one year ago, makes payments to MGNREGS labourers directly to their bank or post office accounts via the nodal bank's central server.

This cashless technology definitively curbs opportunities for corruption.

"Yes, e-fms has made a real difference in Ranchi," said Vinay Kumar Choubey, the tech-savvy deputy commissioner of Ranchi, who's an IIT-Kharagpur alumnus.

Ranchi district has around 1.3 lakh MGNREGS beneficiaries, nearly 90 per cent of whom have bank accounts linked through Aadhaar numbers. E-fms works for all of them.

"Just about a fortnight ago, we managed to reach out through e-fms the beneficiaries of Khalari. Before this, we had done so in 17 blocks. Thus, we have managed to reach out to all the national job scheme labourers in the district through e-fms as far as their wage payments are concerned," Choubey told The Telegraph.

If Ranchi has an e-payment score of 90 per cent, the six other districts of Jharkhand to have e-fms facility - Bokaro, Hazaribagh, Khunti, Lohardaga, Ramgarh and Seraikela-Kharsawan - are not really catching up.

Neighbouring Ramgarh district, with six blocks, has managed to enforce e-fms in all, but of one lakh MGNREGS beneficiaries, the number of people who received cashless payments directly to their accounts is only around 38,000. Progress is slow in Hazaribagh and Bokaro.

In the rest, the e-fms mode hasn't kicked off, not even in Jharkhand's most industrialised district Seraikela-Kharsawan.

"Yes, we will start e-fms very soon. We have managed to tie up with banks and will kick off e-fms in the district in the next one week or so," said K. Jha, deputy commissioner, Seraikela-Kharsawan.

How can the Ranchi model be replicated elsewhere?

The Telegraph, 25 July, 2013, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130725/jsp/jharkhand/story_
17151891.jsp#.UfChw6zcjco


The Telegraph, 25 July, 2013, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130725/jsp/jharkhand/story_17151891.jsp#.UfChw6zcjco


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