Over 200 workers staged a protest outside the Raj Bhawan in Ranchi against the Modi-led Centre for “relentless assault” on their rights and “systematic” dismantling of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

The protest, led by the Jharkhand NREGA Watch and the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, brought together workers Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Bengal in a united stand demanding the proper implementation of the act in letter and spirit.

Later on Saturday, they shared a joint open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren requesting a “big political initiative” to revive MGNREGA and cautioning that they would continue with their agitation till their demands are met.

The demands include immediate reversal of anti-worker technologies such as the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) and the Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS), which have proven to be opaque and arbitrary.
The open letter also threatens that lakhs of workers will vote for the party which takes initiative to revive MGNREGA.

Addressing workers, Maheshwari from Bihar’s Muzaffarpur said that workers in her panchayat are routinely denied their wages on account of NMMS, with officials claiming their names were not on the muster rolls despite their completion of work.

Maheshwari said: “The workers assert that these technologies have resulted in the exclusion of thousands of workers, delays in wage payments, and denial of work, thereby undermining the very spirit of the NREGA.”

A particularly egregious issue raised during the protest was the total suspension of NREGA work in Bengal since December 2021. The workers from Bengal said that alleging implementation leakages, the Centre had invoked Section 27 of the MGNREGA Act, freezing funds for the state and halting all work. As a result, thousands of workers in Bengal have not been paid for their work completed before the suspension, nor have they been able to access new employment under NREGA for nearly three years.

Ambarish from West Bengal’s Purulia district derides the Central Government’s logic of making workers suffer for corruption on the part of government officials.

Workers alleged that middlemen pocket a large portion of workers’ wages and claimed that there is complete absence of political will to address such practices despite these being open secrets.

The workers highlighted that despite their repeated attempts to seek dialogue with the Union rural development minister, they have only been met with roadblocks and broken promises.

James Herenj from the Jharkhand NREGA Watch claimed: “The most recent disappointment came just last week when a scheduled meeting on September 24 was abruptly cancelled without any explanation. This meeting was supposed to include representatives from NREGA workers’ unions across the country, but only one of the six proposed worker representatives was approved by the MoRD — further evidence of the ministry’s unwillingness to listen to the voices of those directly impacted.”