Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Saturday accused the Modi government of "systematically throttling" MGNREGA, and demanded a hike in its budget as it is the "lifeline" of crores of India's poorest communities.

"MGNREGA - the lifeline of crores of India's poorest communities - is being systematically throttled by the non-biological PM's government.

"Budget allocations are being cut relentlessly, and wage rates have been stagnant. Now, through an ill-conceived reliance on technology, workers are being denied their right to work and their right to fair payment," Ramesh said in a statement.

The Congress leader who served as the Union rural development minister in the UPA-2 government, said that in January 2024, the rural development ministry mandated the nationwide implementation of Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS) for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).

To be eligible for ABPS, workers must meet several conditions, including linking Aadhaar to their job card with the name matching in both, and mapping the Aadhaar-seeded bank account with the National Payments Corporation of India, he said.

"Ten months later, we now have data on the catastrophic impact of this policy shift," he alleged.

As per an analysis of the public data available on the MGNREGA portal by Lib Tech, a consortium of academics and activists, 27.4 per cent of all registered workers (6.7 crore) and 4.2 per cent of active workers (54 lakh) remain ineligible for ABPS, Ramesh claimed.

"More worryingly, between April and September this year, 84.8 lakh workers registered under the MGNREGS found their names deleted from the programme.

"This deletion coincides with the implementation of ABPS, and so far, estimates suggest that at least 15 per cent of these deletions were wrongful," Ramesh said.

According to the Congress leader, ABPS-related issues and deletions may be impacting MGNREGA as a whole.

Also, the person days (total number of workdays a person registered under the programme completes in a financial year) generated in MGNREGA have fallen 16.6 per cent since last year, he claimed.

Noting that the ABPS comes in conjunction with the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS), he said both these policies are resulting in the violation of the right to work on demand and the right to timely payment of wages guaranteed under the MGNREGA.

"The rural development must immediately put a stop to this insistence on ABPS and NMMS. Furthermore, the budget for MGNREGA and the daily wage of the workers should be increased," he said.

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