The right to work deleted

Why has there been a surge in the deletion of workers from job cards? Does this have any relation to the government making Aadhaar-based payment systems (ABPS) mandatory in MGNREGA? What is the procedure to be followed to undertake deletions?

Central to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is the legal right to work for 100 days per year per rural household. Each household gets a unique job card containing the list of all its registered adults. One cannot work in MGNREGA without a job card. Addition of new members to job cards happens upon furnishing appropriate documents establishing adulthood.

Schedule II, Paragraph 23 of the Act outlines the procedure for deletions of workers from job cards — “If the Gram panchayat is satisfied at anytime that a person has registered with it by furnishing false information, it may direct the Programme Officer to direct his name to be struck off from the register and direct the applicant to return the job card:” Regarding due process, it says that a deleted worker, if alive, must be “given an opportunity of being heard in the presence of two independent persons.”

Guidelines for deletion

Implementation guidelines for MGNREGA are available in Master Circulars which are released either annually or once in two years by the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD). The Master Circular from 2021-22 specifies clear protocols for worker deletions as follows. A job card can only be deleted under the following situations: (a) when a household permanently migrates, (b) the job card is found to be a duplicate, (c) it was issued based on forged documents.

Additionally, if a Gram Panchayat is reclassified as a Municipal Corporation, all job cards in that panchayat are deleted. In line with the Act, the circular emphasises due process, requiring independent verification by the Programme Officer before any deletions. Moreover, all deletions must be documented, reported to the Gram Sabha/Ward Sabha, and updated in the MGNREGA Management Information System (MIS). The MIS is the digital architecture of MGNREGA. Beyond the listed reasons, the MGNREGA MIS has dropdowns in its menu with 12 reasons for deletions of workers and job cards. Some of which are “Duplicate Applicant”, “Fake Applicant“, “Not willing to work” etc.

In 2021-22, 1.49 crore workers were deleted, which surged to 5.53 crore in 2022-23 resulting in a 247% increase in deletions in 2022-23. In the last four years, names of 10.43 crore MGNREGA workers across India have been deleted.

The surge of deletions in 2022-23 coincided with the period when the Union Government issued several circulars making Aadhaar-based payment systems (ABPS) mandatory in MGNREGA. For ABPS to work, as a first step, every worker’s Aadhaar number had to be seeded with her job card. Senior officials rely on the percentage of workers whose Aadhaar has been seeded with their respective job cards as a metric of compliance. Strict diktats were issued to field officials to increase this percentage.

In response to questions in the Lok Sabha on February 6, 2024, regarding worker deletions in MGNREGA, the Minister of State for Rural Development, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, in a written reply stated: “Updation and deletion of job cards is a regular exercise conducted by the States and Union Territories under MGNREGS. These actions are undertaken to maintain accuracy and transparency.” However, a paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly by Chakradhar Buddha and Laavanya Tamang establishes how field officials resorted to deleting job cards without verification in a rush to increase ABPS compliance percentage. Deleting workers is akin to reducing the denominator to make the fraction bigger.

Methodology followed

The overall number of workers deleted in each State can be easily obtained from the MIS but accessing the official reason in the MIS for such deletions is computationally intense. So, to investigate the reasons for deletions we have resorted to statistical sampling. We randomly sampled one block each in 21 States for the last four financial years including the current one. This yielded data of worker deletions from 1,914 villages. In our sample, more than 2.98 lakh workers were deleted with nearly 1.65 lakh of them being deleted in 2022-23 and around 30,000 deleted in the last six months alone. Figure 1 shows the five States with maximum worker deletions (rounded off) in our sampled villages.

Nearly 53,000 workers were deleted in Madanpur block in Aurangabad district of Bihar and around 32,000 workers in Mayureshwar-I block in Birbhum district of West Bengal were deleted. There is noticeable intra-block variation in the number of workers deleted. For instance, in Madanpur block, 4,877 workers were deleted in Dakshini Umanga village while only three were deleted in Shekhpur village. The situation in West Bengal is different from the rest of the States. As the Union Government has not released any funds to West Bengal from December 26, 2021, no MGNREGA work has happened here since then. In our sampled block in West Bengal, the number of workers deleted jumped from 550 in 2021-22 to 31,861 in the next year. Out of these, half were officially categorised as “Duplicate Applicant” while 10,446 workers who were deleted were categorised as “Non-existent in Panchayat.”

Job cards provide the legal guarantee to work at any time, not just on the day when deletions happen. Deleting workers’ names from job cards on grounds of “not willing to work”, denies the worker her legal right to work. And yet this is the main reason for deleting nearly 1.90 lakh workers in our sample. This is also the main official deletion reason in the MIS for each of the four years in our sample; from 63% of deletions in 2021-22, it jumped to 83% in the ongoing financial year. What is more intriguing is that nearly 20,000 workers who got deleted as “Not willing to work”, actually worked or demanded work in the same financial year in which their names were deleted. In our interactions with civil society organisations working on MGNREGA across 10 States, we found that deletions are often not carried out through Gram Sabhas as mandated by the Act and, alarmingly, without the workers’ knowledge. We have also met workers who are victims of wrongful deletions. Further, the official reason for deleting 1,500 workers in our sample is “Village becomes urban.” This reason is observed in 153 out of 1,914 villages in our sample. But as per the Act, if a village becomes urban, then the job cards of all the workers in that village would have to be deleted. So clearly, using this reason to delete a subset of workers appears absurd.

Sticking points

Since our sample contains all the transactions of deletions in the selected blocks, the trend we observe is likely to hold for the whole country although the actual proportions might fluctuate a little. Two points from the data are hard to believe. First, despite high rural unemployment, as per official reasons, 71% of workers in our sample are “not willing to work.” Second, the government’s claims that the surge in deletions has no connection with making ABPS mandatory although all the circumstantial evidence concerning deletions suggest otherwise. The response to our RTI application from MoRD suggests that, despite listing deletion reasons in the MIS, the ministry has not conducted any verification and analysis of deletion reasons, including the ‘Not willing to work’ reason. This further corroborates the arbitrariness concerning the violations of the right to work.

Adhering to the verification processes and protocols outlined in the Act and Master Circular is crucial to prevent arbitrary deletions. Conducting independent audits, regular reviews, involving gram sabhas and efficient grievance redress systems can reduce irregularities. Training Gram Panchayats to conduct impartial inquiries and including worker representatives in decision-making panels are needed. Public consultations and proactive measures to enhance transparency, accountability, and fairness are vital to guarantee MGNREGA’s mandate of employment and social justice.

Buddha & Narayanan are affiliated with LibTech India. Narayanan is a faculty member at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. The views expressed are personal. The authors thank Suguna Bheemerasetti of LibTech India for scraping the data for this analysis.

Published - November 28, 2024 06:30 am IST