The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005
The most ambitious project of Lateral Praxis has been taken up in collaboration various partners. The system e-enables the Muster and is currently running in the State of Madhya Pradesh. A paper detailing the same has been published in the compendium (copy included in the Annexure) of the 12th National Conference on e-Governance conference held on 12th, 13th February, 2009.
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA) guarantees 100 days of employment in a financial year to any rural household whose adult members are willing to do unskilled manual work. While analyzing the implementation of the scheme, the social audit study of the scheme done in Orissa from 3rd to 12th October, 2007 by students of the G. B. Pant Social Science Institute (Allahabad University) stated that although the scheme had been implemented it was found to be vulnerable to corruption and benefits were not reaching the beneficiaries. The root cause of the problem was the muster, only 60% being genuine, and inconsistently maintained Job Cards. After internal discussions it was concluded that if the enrolment of beneficiaries and collection of attendance could be e-enabled, this being the base data for the entire scheme, and which in turn would allow for the auto-generation of the muster by taking certain inputs from the engineers, manipulations could be considerably minimized and the entire system could be made more transparent and accountable.
Considering that the only means of communication which worked with certainty in rural areas was a mobile it was decided that a SIM card enabled biometric device would be used for the purpose of enrolment and marking attendance. The device could transmit any data using the mobile network and hence could integrate with a web-based central server. The device was envisaged to be used in the offline mode as well.
Following was the solution that was conceptualized:
- An offline system was designed to work at the Panchayat level in order to capture all transactions related to the scheme viz. data for enrolled persons, job cards, all proposed works, demand for work, allocation of work, attendance, evaluation, generation of muster, recording of other expenses and generation of the payslip. This software would interface with the attendance device. The system would be installed at the block as well and the Sachiv/ MET (MGNREGA official) would be responsible for carrying all data from the Panchayat level to be updated in the block software.
- Since the above would require creation of some infrastructure at the Panchayat level alternatively it was proposed that the same software could work only at the block level and capture transactions for all panchayats within the block with only the attendance device remaining in the Panchayat for the purpose of collection of attendance.
- The Gram Sachiv/ MET would be trained at the Panchayat to get the attendance marked.
- The device, works both in online and offline modes. The device is able to store the attendance records and thus in the case of failure of the mobile network the attendance data for a week can easily be stored in the device.
- In case the system is installed at the block level, the Sachiv, when visiting the block for the upload of attendance of the previous week from the device, would also carry data for the demand and allocation of work for the following weeks which is required for the purpose of generation of the muster. If installed at the Panchayat level the system can be updated whenever the Sachiv visits Panchayat office.
- The Central Server will always be up to date in terms of attendance but since internet connections are available only at the block level, the other data would be updated by providing relevant uploads from the system at the block.
- The Central Server will have logins for officials at District, State levels to view to extent and details of implementation of the scheme
- Finally the solution will enable the generation of electronic clearing statement bank-wise, for each beneficiary of the scheme.