Thursday, December 2, 2010
907 -Keep UID out of NREGA - The Hindu
December 1, 2010
A statement that has been endorsed by 100 individuals/groups from across the world.
The undersigned demand that the plan to link the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) to Aadhaar (or UID) be revoked immediately. This is an extremely dangerous move that threatens to cause havoc in MGNREGA's fragile structure.
The Ministry of Rural Development has put out a tender (dated October 11, 2010) worth Rs.2,162 crore to engage “service providers” for MGNREGA under a “public private partnership” model. The contract includes “UIDAI compliant enrolment of job card holders under MGNREGA scheme,” “Recording ... data in the field such as biometric attendance at worksite with GPS coordinates … and updation of centralised MIS,” and similar measures.
Clearly, the Ministry intends to link the issue of new job cards to UID enrolment in the States. Job cards issued in 2006 are due to expire in 2011. Job cards are required to claim employment under the MGNREGA. If the issue of new job cards is linked to UID enrolment, there is a danger of creating a jam that would disrupt the programme. The process of job cards renewal, in any case a slow process, will be further slowed down. Many people are likely to be denied their entitlement to 100 days of work as they will be without a job card. Further, in spite of the hiring of “service providers”, the entire administrative machinery is likely to be diverted into capturing of biometrics or supervising “service providers”. The scale of MGNREGA works is bound to suffer. This would be a gross injustice to NREGA workers, who are already deprived of their basic entitlements.
The proposal of “biometric attendance at the worksite with GPS coordinates” is completely impractical — many MGNREGA worksites are in remote areas with poor or no connectivity. Does that mean those worksites will close down?
We do welcome the use of technology provided that it enhances transparency, empowers labourers and is cost effective. Such technology has been used with success in Tamil Nadu. For instance, it combines SMS reports on daily attendance with random spot checks to curb the problem of fake muster roll entries. Localised use of biometrics, independent of UID, to speed up payments can be considered. Biometrics and UID are not the same. In Rajasthan, simpler measures have been put in place, such as “transparency walls” where all job card holders in the Gram Panchayat are listed along with days of work, allowing people to monitor implementation.
There are many problems in the implementation of the MGNREGA which need the urgent attention of the Ministry. These include the non-payment of minimum wages, delays in wage payments, insufficient scale of MGNREGA works, discrimination against Dalits and women, and so on.
We therefore demand that neither MGNREGA employment nor wage payments be linked to UID enrolment. Employment of 100 days under MGNREGA is the only universal entitlement that the rural poor enjoy. It should not be jeopardised by the introduction of disruptive technology under pressure from corporate and security lobbies.
Signatories: Nikhil Dey, Aruna Roy and Shankar Singh (Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan); Jayati Ghosh (Professor, CESP/SSS, Jawaharlal Nehru University); Jean Drèze (Honorary Professor, University of Allahabad); Kamal Mitra Chenoy (Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University); Reetika Khera (Visitor, Centre for Development Economics); R. Ramakumar (Associate Professor, Tata Institute for Social Sciences); Mallika Sarabhai (CRANTI, Citizens Resource and Action Network Initiative) and others.
The undersigned demand that the plan to link the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) to Aadhaar (or UID) be revoked immediately. This is an extremely dangerous move that threatens to cause havoc in MGNREGA's fragile structure.
The Ministry of Rural Development has put out a tender (dated October 11, 2010) worth Rs.2,162 crore to engage “service providers” for MGNREGA under a “public private partnership” model. The contract includes “UIDAI compliant enrolment of job card holders under MGNREGA scheme,” “Recording ... data in the field such as biometric attendance at worksite with GPS coordinates … and updation of centralised MIS,” and similar measures.
Clearly, the Ministry intends to link the issue of new job cards to UID enrolment in the States. Job cards issued in 2006 are due to expire in 2011. Job cards are required to claim employment under the MGNREGA. If the issue of new job cards is linked to UID enrolment, there is a danger of creating a jam that would disrupt the programme. The process of job cards renewal, in any case a slow process, will be further slowed down. Many people are likely to be denied their entitlement to 100 days of work as they will be without a job card. Further, in spite of the hiring of “service providers”, the entire administrative machinery is likely to be diverted into capturing of biometrics or supervising “service providers”. The scale of MGNREGA works is bound to suffer. This would be a gross injustice to NREGA workers, who are already deprived of their basic entitlements.
The proposal of “biometric attendance at the worksite with GPS coordinates” is completely impractical — many MGNREGA worksites are in remote areas with poor or no connectivity. Does that mean those worksites will close down?
We do welcome the use of technology provided that it enhances transparency, empowers labourers and is cost effective. Such technology has been used with success in Tamil Nadu. For instance, it combines SMS reports on daily attendance with random spot checks to curb the problem of fake muster roll entries. Localised use of biometrics, independent of UID, to speed up payments can be considered. Biometrics and UID are not the same. In Rajasthan, simpler measures have been put in place, such as “transparency walls” where all job card holders in the Gram Panchayat are listed along with days of work, allowing people to monitor implementation.
There are many problems in the implementation of the MGNREGA which need the urgent attention of the Ministry. These include the non-payment of minimum wages, delays in wage payments, insufficient scale of MGNREGA works, discrimination against Dalits and women, and so on.
We therefore demand that neither MGNREGA employment nor wage payments be linked to UID enrolment. Employment of 100 days under MGNREGA is the only universal entitlement that the rural poor enjoy. It should not be jeopardised by the introduction of disruptive technology under pressure from corporate and security lobbies.
Signatories: Nikhil Dey, Aruna Roy and Shankar Singh (Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan); Jayati Ghosh (Professor, CESP/SSS, Jawaharlal Nehru University); Jean Drèze (Honorary Professor, University of Allahabad); Kamal Mitra Chenoy (Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University); Reetika Khera (Visitor, Centre for Development Economics); R. Ramakumar (Associate Professor, Tata Institute for Social Sciences); Mallika Sarabhai (CRANTI, Citizens Resource and Action Network Initiative) and others.
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REETIKA KEHERA
30th August 2010
Not all that Unique by Reetika Khera
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)’s ambitious plan of issuing a unique biometric-enabled number, innocuously called ‘aadhaar’, to every Indian resident has finally begun to generate a debate on citizen-State relations,
privacy, financial implications, and operational practicalities.
What the debate has largely missed so far, however, is the credibility of the UIDAI’s claims in the field of social policy, particularly the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and Public Distribution System (PDS). Tall claims (“the project possesses the power to eliminate financial exclusion, enhance accessibility, and uplift living standards for the majority poor”) have been made. Scrutinising the UIDAI’s documents reveals their poor understanding of how PDS and NREGA leakages occur and little evidence of creative thinking on plugging them. Instead, one is treated to rhetorical statements peppered with the ‘Aadhaar-enabled’ buzzword.
In the days of cash payments of wages, it was quite easy to embezzle NREGA funds by inflating attendance records and pocketing the difference. In 2008, the government made it mandatory for all NREGA wages to be paid through banks and post offices. The introduction of payments through accounts has made corruption difficult, but three ways of siphoning off money remain — extortion, collusion and fraud. Extortion means that when ‘inflated’ wages are withdrawn by labourers from their account, the middleman turns extortionist and takes a share. Collusion occurs when the labourer and the middleman agree to share the inflated wages that are credited to the labourer’s account. Fraud means that middlemen open and operate accounts on behalf of labourers and pay them cash. Biometric-enabled UID to authenticate identity can only help to prevent ‘fraud’, but is of little use in preventing collusion or extortion.
Even on the specific issue of eliminating fraud, the UIDAI’s thinking is muddled. “Once each citizen in a job card needs to provide his UID before claiming employment, the potential for ghost or fictitious beneficiaries is eliminated.” Elimination of ghost beneficiaries would be an important contribution, but as the same sentence makes clear, it requires compulsory and universal enrolment. Yet, public statements convey that UID enrolment will be voluntary.
Nilekani speaks of “how having a UID can give automatic benefits” (Indian Express). In practice, there will be automatic exclusion as those who do not enrol will be turned away. We learnt this lesson the hard way in the transition to bank payments. Poorly-equipped and understaffed banks were expected to open millions of NREGA accounts overnight. Labourers began to be denied work — “no account, no work,” they were told. The UIDAI is also poorly informed. “In many areas the wages continue to be paid in the form of cash.” In fact, the transition to bank payments is largely complete (83 per cent NREGA job cardholders have an account). Tamil Nadu is the only ‘area’ where wages continue to be paid in cash (retained for the sake of speed).
Sometimes the UIDAI documents contain plain gibberish. Jumping on the social audits bandwagon, they say: “The village-level social audit committee can be selected after authentication with the UID database. The social audit reports filed by the village-level committees can be authenticated by the biometrics of the committee members and the social audit coordinator.”
Turning to the PDS, the most important contribution of the UID would be to eliminate duplicate cards. But what proportion of cards in circulation are duplicates? The little reliable data on this suggest it is not large: 2 per cent in Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh’s computerisation drive to issue hologram-enabled cards eliminated 8 per cent duplicates.
The UIDAI believes that “a key source of leakage identified in the PDS, is subsidised food drawn from the ration shop in the names of eligible families by someone else”. Again, a quick tutorial on PDS leakages might help. There are two major sources of leakage from the PDS: one, diversion of grain, en route to the village ration shop. Dealers then appear helpless saying that they have been issued less by the authorities. Two, dealers undersell (e.g., only 25kg out of the 35kg entitlement) and yet make people testify on official records that they got their full quota. When villagers are disempowered and forced to buy from the same dealer, they feel resigned to being cheated.
The UIDAI recommends that people be freed from the monopoly of dealers, i.e. if he is corrupt, they can go to another. (Finally a usable idea, but alas, an old one.) Conflating the UID with benefits, the UIDAI goes on to make a bogus claim of “portability of benefits” (at least four times in their paper). Portability of benefits requires grappling with operational issues that Aadhaar cannot solve.
Aadhaar is about “inclusivity, the purpose is a better quality of public service delivery, it’s about giving people, who have been denied identity, a chance” (Nilekani, Economic Times). Yet, the UIDAI states: “The NREGA programme can be used to enrol residents into the UID programme” and that the PDS “will provide the necessary impetus for penetration of UID”. If the idea is to use the existing NREGA and PDS database to enrol people, where does ‘inclusivity’ come in? Perhaps the UIDAI needs the PDS and NREGA databases more than these programmes need the UID.
If the UIDAI is serious, it must think about the difficult questions: what if the grain/wages are snatched away after authentication, or if tele-links or hand-held devices break down? What about the costs involved? Illegal fees are routinely charged for ration and job cards — what prevents this from happening while finger-printing? Most importantly, what will Aadhaar add to what can be achieved by computerisation of operations, a reliable MIS, and simpler ‘technologies’ for transparency (e.g., the information walls in Rajasthan)?
If the rhetoric on inclusivity is only a ‘PR’ exercise, what actually drives the UID project? As former Intelligence Bureau chief A.K. Doval candidly said in Tehelka, “It [UID] was intended to wash out the aliens and unauthorised people. But the focus appears to be shifting. Now, it is being projected as more development-oriented, lest it ruffle any feathers.”
Reetika Khera is a development economist at the Delhi School of Economics The views expressed by the author are personal
