Press Information Bureau

State/UT-wise details of the numbers of the active workers under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (Mahatma Gandhi NREGS) in the financial year 2021-22 are given at Annexure-I.

State/UT-wise details of the number of workers whose Aadhaar numbers have been seeded with Aadhaar Based Payment System (ABPS) under Mahatma Gandhi NREGS as on 28.07.2023 are given at Annexure-II.

No worker under Mahatma Gandhi NREGS has been denied for the wage payment due to ABPS. To ensure timely payment of wages to the beneficiaries under Mahatma Gandhi NREGS and to address the issues arises due to frequent change of Bank Account Numbers by the beneficiaries and subsequent non-updation by the Programme Officers, it has been decided to adopt Aadhaar Base Payment System (ABPS) which does not get affected due to change of bank account. Also to ensure that only genuine beneficiaries should get benefit of the Scheme, de-duplication of the existing beneficiaries to be done. For this, Aadhaar Base Payment System is the best alternative.

ABPS has been made mandatory w.e.f. 1^st Feb, 2023 in Mahatma Gandhi NREGS. However, as per the request made by several States, it had been decided by the Ministry that till 31st August, 2023, the wage payment of the beneficiaries is being made either using ABPS or NACH mode depending upon the status on ABPS of a beneficiary.

In case states/UTs faces any kind of issues or problems, in respect of ABPS the same are resolved on priority basis.

To ensure more transparency in the implementation of Mahatma Gandhi NREGS in the States/UTs, capturing of attendance with geo-tagged, two time-stamped photographs of the workers in a day through National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) App for all the works (except individual beneficiary works) has been made mandatory from 1^st January, 2023.

This increases citizen oversight of the Scheme besides enabling faster processing of payments. Worksite supervisors are responsible for capturing attendance along with geo-tagged photographs of the workers through the NMMS App.

The technical issues being faced in NMMS App are taken up with NIC, Rural Development on a real-time basis. The new provisions/ suggestions requested by the States/UTs are being incorporated. All the issues concerning the NMMS app are reviewed and resolved from time to time.

NMMS app has been modified to capture the second photograph just after 4 hours of uploading the attendance and first photograph. The morning attendance along with the first photograph and second photograph can be captured in offline mode and to be uploaded once the device comes into a network. In case of exceptional circumstances due to which attendance could not be uploaded, the District Programme Coordinator (DPC) has been authorized to upload the manual attendance.

Annexure-I

Annexure-II

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SK/SS/1547