'Stop weaponising tech': Congress slams Modi govt over Aadhaar-based payment system for MGNREGA workers

Jairam Ramesh alleged that ground verification has shown that the tearing hurry of the Modi government to implement Aadhaar authentication and ABPS has led to a 'significant number of wrongful deletions'.

New Delhi: With payment of MGNREGA workers’ set to be done only through an Aadhaar-based system from now on, the Congress on Monday called it Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 'cruel New Year gift', claiming that it 'excludes' crores of poorest and marginalised citizens from earning a basic income.

Congress General Secretary (Communications) Jairam Ramesh said the Modi government is continuing with the 'destructive experiments with technology' as the Ministry of Rural Development did not extend the December 31 deadline for implementing Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS), which requires Aadhaar details of workers to be seeded to job cards.

In a statement, Ramesh said there are 25.69 crore MGNREGA workers of which 14.33 crore are considered active workers and of this, 34.8 per cent (8.9 crore) and 12.7 per cent (1.8 crore) respectively are ineligible for ABPS. He said the government has gone ahead with it despite workers, practitioners and researchers having highlighted the problems.

“The Prime Minister’s well-known disdain for MGNREGA has translated into a slew of experiments designed to use technology as a weapon to exclude – such as the digital attendance (NMMS), ABPS, drone monitoring and the proposed integration of facial recognition to NMMS. No due consultation or scientific piloting was done before unleashing these ‘experiments’ on crores of Indians,” he said.

He said the Congress is reiterating its demand of August 30 last year that the Modi government should 'stop weaponising technology, especially Aadhaar to deny the most vulnerable Indians their social welfare benefits, release delayed wage payments and implement open muster rolls and social audits to improve transparency'.

Countering the Ministry’s 'questionable' claim in August 2023 that no job cards will be deleted on the basis that the worker is not eligible for ABPS, he said that an alarming number of 7.6 crore workers’ cards have been deleted since April 2022. He said 1.9 crore cards were deleted in the first nine months into the current fiscal.

He alleged that ground verification has shown that the tearing hurry of the Modi government to implement Aadhaar authentication and ABPS has led to a 'significant number of wrongful deletions'.

Sounding suspicious of the claim that different stakeholders have found ABPS as the best route for wage payment, Ramesh asked the Ministry to clarify who these stakeholders were and when these consultations were held while alleging that the Modi government has turned a deaf ear to the multiple concerns on ABPS and other technological interventions.

Ramesh also said the Ministry’s claims regarding increase in payment efficiency with the ABPS remains unsubstantiated and have been debunked by a paper published by LibTech India.