The Glitchy Government App Slashing Indian Workers’ Paychecks
Reading Time: 5 minutesA new attendance system was supposed to bring transparency to a government work program in rural India. It’s actually forcing people to work for free., Indian workers protest against a glitchy app-based attendance system.
NEW DELHI—On a hot March afternoon, Anita Devi sits with hundreds of fellow workers at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. The astrological observatory, built in the 1700s, now serves as a popular demonstration site, and workers have been there since Feb. 16, camping out from morning to dusk. Demonstrators around Devi, most of them women, hold placards that call for the rollback of a mobile app that is used to mark their attendance in a government work program.
Devi is one of more than 141 million active workers in India’s flagship employment guarantee program, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The program is an important safety net for the millions who live below the poverty line in India, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic forced a pan-India lockdown and left people jobless. The MGNREGA, launched in 2006, guarantees at least 100 days of work per year to rural households. The program also prioritizes women—for the past five years, women have made up more than half of the participants. The workers, who earn a paltry 200 rupees a day (about U.S.$2.40), have been instrumental in building rural infrastructure in India, including roads, irrigation channels, and wells.
But these daily wage workers complain that a newly mandated app-based attendance system marks them absent even when they work all day. They say the mobile app, called National Mobile Monitoring Software, is glitchy and causes them to lose hard-earned money. ‘It is like working free for the government,’ Devi told me.
Devi was offered work under the MGNREGA in January, and she worked for six days constructing a road near her village in the Indian state of Jharkhand. When payday came, she was paid for only four of those days, she said. ‘For the rest of the two days, the app showed I had not turned up for work,’ Devi told me.
Long before the app, work attendance for the MGNREGA was marked on a physical list generated by the program’s administration and filled in by a site supervisor. Since the beginning of this year, supervisors are now also tasked with tracking attendance on the app, where they have to upload photos of the workers. Devi told me she was shown present for all six days on the physical list, but the NMMS app showed she had worked for only four days. The government relied on the app record and slashed her wages.
The government, for its part, says the app brings more transparency and citizen oversight to the program. Many activists agree that mismanagement has been a real problem in the work program—but an error-prone, inaccessible app, they say, is not the right solution. Devi, for example, says her photos were uploaded twice every day, yet the app still marked her absent. She’s not alone. Thousands of workers across India have complained that the app malfunctions or does not work in regions with unreliable internet connectivity.
Supervisors are required to download the app on their smartphones, where they can then access the details of the MGNREGA workers in their cluster of villages or blocks. To mark attendance, they download the list of the workers every day and mark them present. To authenticate their presence on the worksite, the supervisors then take and upload geotagged photos of the workers through the app-enabled camera. Inexplicably, though, there is no system to match photos with names, leaving lots of room for error and little accountability—the supervisors can effectively upload photos of anyone. In addition to names and photos, the app also holds personal data from workers including their addresses and identity numbers.
The first round of attendance takes place between 6 and 7 a.m., and the second happens later in the afternoon. There are lots of glitches. ‘Sometimes the photos are not uploaded; sometimes the network is weak and the attendance is not submitted. Sometimes it just shows an error and there is no way to fix that,’ said Tripa Khakha, a site supervisor for MGNREGA in Jharkhand.
Khakha said the app tends to be glitchier during the second attendance round, and there is no redress for errors. ‘The government trusts the app more than the workers and their hard work,’ Khakha told me.
All these errors put a serious dent in the government’s argument that the app brings transparency to the program, said Nikhil Dey, a member of NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, a national platform of workers’ collectives. According to Dey, who was one of the architects of the MGNREGA, it’s often hard to identify who is in the photos taken by supervisors—for example, sometimes women’s faces are covered.
Some of these errors could be attributable to a lackluster pilot of the app. Before its countrywide launch, the app was piloted in 2021 in the Alwar district of Rajasthan—a small region that couldn’t have provided enough data to greenlight a national rollout, said Apurva Gupta, a researcher and member of NREGA Sangharsh Morcha.
Many supervisors who previously marked attendance manually say they cannot afford the smartphones required to use the NMMS app. A majority of the women in rural India do not own such a phone. Gupta said she’s heard stories of people taking out loans or borrowing money to buy a smartphone so they could use the app.
If they can get a phone, the next hurdle for workers is connectivity. According to a report from Oxfam, only 31 percent of India’s rural population uses the internet, and mobile internet connectivity in India is slowing down compared with previous years, the BBC reported in January. For the past five years, India has been leading the list of countries with the most internet shutdowns. In 2022 the Indian government shut down the internet 84 times in different regions. And those issues, Gupta said, also affect attendance apps like NMMS.
The app is part of a larger push over the past decade from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi toward digitizing governance, a move he claims will weed out corruption and bureaucratic hassles. The flagship program for these efforts, touted as Digital India, aims to make every aspect of governance, policing, and financial transactions digital. To do so, the government has encouraged the use of digital banking and introduced smart policing through advanced technology and surveillance. In many Indian cities, the government forces sanitation workers to wear GPS-enabled smartwatches to keep track of their movements in real time, raising serious privacy concerns. Similarly, there’s no legal oversight in place for the millions of photos of MGNREGA workers uploaded on the app every day.
Some workers’ rights activists say the app is actually part of a politically motivated attempt by Modi to scrap the MGNREGA, which he’s called a ‘living monument’ to the failures of the United Progressive Alliance. The UPA is a coalition of several national political parties, led by the Indian National Congress party (the rival of Modi’s party), which held power from 2004 to 2014. The Modi government’s aversion to MGNREGA is also reflected in this year’s budget, in which the government slashed the program’s funding, despite considerable demand for work. Around 41 percent of village councils reported no NMMS device usage, according to reporting by the Hindu, which noted that activists say the government hopes to use a slowdown in app use to prove a slowdown in interest in the program.
But the growing demand for work under MGNREGA paints a different picture. The program continues to be a safety net for millions in India. Government data shows that 75 million households worked during fiscal year 2020–21, up from 54.8 million in fiscal year 2019–20.
At Jantar Mantar, the MGNREGA workers, mostly women, still stand strong a month into the protest. They’ve witnessed the biting cold change into a warm and bright summer. They have stood their ground during strong winds and downpours. They’ve been braving it all—just to get their meager wages on time and with dignity.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/digital-india-mgnrega-protest.html
Ref: slate
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