The Union government has acknowledged that the online attendance registration system that requires uploading of pictures from work sites, introduced to curb corruption in the Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), had failed to achieve the desired objective.
In a letter to the principal secretaries in charge of rural development departments in states, the ministry of rural development (MoRD) last week listed out seven ways the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) was being “misused or manipulated”. Now, the government wants the gram panchayats to verify all the pictures taken from workers, a directive described by civil society groups as “not feasible”.
In May 2022, the MoRD introduced the NMMS, saying it would bring transparency in the attendance registration system of the MGNREGA.
The NMMS was made mandatory from January 2023. Under the NMMS, gram panchayat-level MGNREGA workers would take picture of workers and upload them on the NMMS app. They would upload a second picture of the same workers at the same site after a gap of four hours. Earlier, gram panchayats used to maintain attendance in the physical form, which was discontinued in January 2023.
“It has come to the notice of the MoRD that in several instances, the use of the NMMS for capturing daily attendance and work site photographs under the MGNREGA is being misused or manipulated. Such serious discrepancies undermine the credibility of the digital attendance system and may lead to potential misuse of public funds,” said the letter issued by Abhishek Kumar, an under-secretary in the MoRD.