New Delhi – The Ministry of Rural Development has launched a pilot project of capturing attendance at worksites through APP introduced under National Mobile Monitoring System. The attendance through this new method is made compulsory where more than 20 workers are employed on a site under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme ( MGNREGS ).
But , the new pattern of attendance has hit the salary turnout of the workers due to technical glitches in the APP and grim technical support. The women workers have come under the fire and maximum are dropped out of work as families donot allow them to keep mobile phones or they cannot affort keeping cell phones.
The Ministry has started this project last year on 21 May but now it is directed to make it mandatory to mark digital attendance from May 16 this year. The directives given by ministry claim that the app which requires two time stamped and geotagged photographs of the workers in a day would help encourage keeping transparency.
According to Nikhil Shenoy who is associated with Rajsthan Asangathit Mazdoor Union said around 15000 women workers were mobilized to work on different worksites. But the introduction of complusory attendance system on APP has given discouraging results as most of the women workers have to depend on their husbands or other male family members for this and which has ultimately resulted in explusion of the women workers taken in under MGNREGS.
The anxiousness amongst workers increase as the attendance is directly related to their salaries. The slow internet speed in villages and block levels, little or no technical support and even the supervisors at worksites not having smartphones and internet support is adding more to lapse of the new method.
Whereas, it is to mention here that Union Government has resolved some critical problems regarding this scheme last year. Under MGNREGA, the workers can do time bound or task based work. Two time geotagged and time stampped photograph one at 11 am and the other at 2 pm was made compulsory, initially. For this purpose , even if the workers used to complete work early, they had to stay back at site till 2pm to get their photograph attendance uploaded. But now, this rule has been amended.
