Still something important needs to be done…. (Challenging factor)

Now community is aware about the MGNREGA and almost 100% of target communities have job cards, 14% of target community have received 100 days of work, 36% of target community received full wages, but still the problem of delay in payment is there, which hinders the proper implementation of NREGA. Although along with the community HARIT PRAYAS team is working in close collaboration with the Panchayat and banks, but the basic problem stays at bank , where with one bank ( with 2 staff) the work load is about 6000-8000 account holders. Inspite of all this hurdles status of delay in payment has improved .Status of payment in NREGA (in target villages with target community) is as:

Places	Average payment days ( 2011)[1]	Average payment days (2012)[2]
Jhansi	4.5 months	30-45 days
Sagar	4-5 months	40 days
Satna-Chatarpur	4 months	30 days

Moving to the field and with interaction with the community we have find, various hurdles appear to contribute to the delays in Payment under NREGA. These include the following:

• delays in work measurement (themselves linked to the tyrannical behaviour of the engineering staff),
• bottlenecks in the flow of funds (sometimes bringing NREGA to a halt in entire blocks), irresponsible record-keeping (such as non-maintenance of muster rolls and job cards),

• Hurdles related to bank payments.

• HH working in NREGA are still not aware about where to complain about the delay in payment.

• More work load on bank with minimum staff

• Access of banks is quite far from the villages.

• Financial literacy about the bank procedure.

With bank payments making it much harder to embezzle NREGA funds, the whole programme is now seen as a headache by many government functionaries: the workload remains but the “inducements” do not. Aside from the possibility of foot-dragging, slowing down wage payments is a convenient way of sabotaging NREGA, because it makes workers themselves turn against the programme. We surmise, is the real reason why massive delays have emerged around the same time as the transition to bank payments. Seen in this light, the delays are not just mere operational hurdles.

“Farmers from Kadta village ( Sagar)[1]  and Karondiya village (Chatarpur) shared that now we are able to get work in our village, but still the getting wages on time is the big problem, once we would start getting wages on time probably no one would migrate from the village, we love to be here, but we also need money for our survival”

Report recommendation (or future possible area of action):

The HARIT PRAYAS team recommends the following to strengthen the timely payment in NREGA:

• Availability of banks in the villages and provision of ATM cards for the NREGA job card holders. It would be good if the government could able to introduce ATM cards along with the job cards formation.

• Financial literacy through village secondary school/Panchyat/Banks for people working under NREGA

• More staff in the rural banking services and probably the local staff so that their availability would be there in the bank on regular basis and officials would able to understand the language of the local people and assist them in bank processing.

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[1] Source: baseline survey report

[2] Source: Monthly monitoring and FGD with the target families