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Technology in Governance
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and pension payments in (undivided) Andhra Pradesh accounted for more than 90% of Aadhaar-authenticated payments in India. This may be the way forward for other public programmes that are plagued with inefficiency and corruption. Technology when worked on and used right takes us into a regime of transparency and impartial decision-making that are key to good governance.
Since its inception, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has been the subject of many debates. A major criticism has been about the inefficiencies that dog the programme—non-provision of work, delay in payments, duplicate job cards, non-existent works, leakages, etc.
From an administrative perspective, the implementation of the MGNREGS has posed tremendous challenges to state machinery across the country. The scheme operates within a rights-based framework which guarantees several entitlements with timelines to crores of wage seekers. Ensuring repeated cycles of providing work to an open-ended number of wage seekers in every village and habitation, and making measurements and payments through the year, apart from providing other entitlements like worksite facilities, conducting social audits, etc, has placed severe pressure on implementing agencies.
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