New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government is planning to introduce face authentication to mark attendance of workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) from early next year, ThePrint has learnt.
The idea is to help weed out ghost beneficiaries and reduce financial irregularities in the rural employment scheme, and make it more transparent. However, the ministry plans to keep attendance by facial recognition optional.
The move comes almost a year after the Centre made digital capturing of attendance under MGNREGS universal, starting 1 January 2023.
The Union Rural Development Ministry has asked all state governments and Union territories to test the new feature and prepare for its implementation, two senior ministry officials said, adding that the face authentication or recognition feature has been included in the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) app.
Last month, it is learnt, the ministry made a presentation to explain the modalities to states and UTs.
“Last week, we asked states and UTs to start testing the feature so that glitches can be addressed. We have also asked them to prepare for its implementation across the states/UTs. This will bring greater transparency in the implementation of the scheme and ensure that only genuine workers are at the worksites,” said a senior ministry official.
“The plan is to roll it out soon, but this will be optional (attendance can still be marked manually on the NMMS app). ”
Under the new feature, a worker’s face will be scanned and matched against their Aadhaar data with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for authentication.
The worker’s face will subsequently be scanned for attendance whenever he/she reports to work. “Face authentication will be done just once with UIDAI data,” said the official.
Facial recognition is currently being used by some state governments such as Telangana and Karnataka for disbursement of pension, and marking attendance of officials, issuing drivers’ licence etc.
It is also a feature in DigiYatra, the biometric and contactless security clearance system rolled out at some airports.
ThePrint reached the Union Rural Development Ministry for a comment via email Thursday, and a response is awaited.
Like with the digital attendance system, activists have raised concerns about the potential problems facial recognition can create for MGNREGS workers in remote areas with patchy net services.
Social activist Nikhil Dey, co-founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and member of the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, said the “government and the ministry has relentlessly pursued mass technology options to control what they say are large-scale issues of corruption”.
“We have seen that whenever they have applied these seriously, they have led to large exclusions,” he added.
“The use of facial recognition technology will lead to much greater amounts of exclusion as the technology requires much greater quality of internet connectivity,” he said. “The fact that it is not mandatory is not enough, because, once it is introduced, the implementation machinery is likely to make it another means to selectively harass workers, and what is introduced today without proper pilots and studies showing efficacy, may well become mass experimentation at the cost of livelihood access for the poor.”
Also Read: UP, MP to Assam, several districts have no MGNREGS ombudsperson to address workers’ grievances
‘To ensure genuine beneficiaries benefit’
One of the biggest challenges in the implementation of the MGNREGS, ministry officials said, has been ensuring that the workers present at a job site are genuine beneficiaries.
In 2022-23, 5.18 crore names of workers were deleted from MGNREGS, according to a response by the ministry to a Parliament question in July this year.
The reasons for deletions included fake and duplicate job cards, apart from others such as beneficiaries shifting out.
In another response to a Parliament question during the ongoing winter session, the ministry said 7.43 lakh “fake job cards” were deleted in 2022-23.
The use of face authentication technology, officials said, will end this problem.
“In this, workers’ faces will be scanned every time he/she reports to work. Only genuine, registered workers will be allowed to work at site,” said an official.
Digital capturing of attendance was another step in the same direction.
“Attendance is taken along with two geo-tagged, time-stamped photographs of the workers in a day through the NMMS mobile application for all the works… it has been made mandatory,” said a senior ministry official.
Under the present system, a group photograph of the workers is taken twice, after a gap of four hours, at the work site. In some of the photographs uploaded on the MGNREGS portal, the faces of the workers are unclear or the women workers have their faces covered.
“But under face authentication, the mates (MGNREGS aides who help with the scheme’s implementation), will have to scan the faces of all the workers. In case there is some technical glitch, then there will be a provision to manually enter the attendance in the mobile application,” the first official quoted above said.
States gearing up
For the implementation of the new technology, states will have to train their field staff and MGNREGS mates, who are responsible for taking attendance, and also assist them in upgrading their mobile phones (mates use their own phones) in using this sophisticated technology. The pilot was tested in Haryana’s Fatehabad in October this year, and the state government is using face authentication in the district’s Tohana block at present.
“We have been using this technology for the past two months now. There are no major problems as of now, but field staff require training in using this,” said an official with the Haryana government’s rural development department.
Explaining the process, the official said each worker’s face authentication with UIDAI data has been done through a mobile app suggested by the ministry.
“The authenticated data of the workers is now integrated with the MGNREGS portal. Now, whenever these workers come for work, we just scan their faces to mark attendance.”
The official added that there were cases where the facial features did not match a worker’s Aadhaar photograph, and they had had to ask them to get their Aadhaar photos updated.
Although the ministry has asked states to start testing the new feature and report if they face any problem, not all states have started the work on the ground.
A senior official with the Bihar government, who did not want to be named, said, “The ministry made a presentation last month about it, but we are yet to start using it. We have been asked to prepare for its implementation. We plan to start training our staff soon. But this has to be rolled out in a phased manner, as it will be difficult to implement it across the state in one go.”
Activists have urged caution as well.
Chakradhar Buddha, a senior researcher with LibTech India, an organisation working to improve public service delivery, said “workers are missing wages due to technical glitches with the NMMS”.
“Now, the implementation of facial recognition technology, which relies on a stable internet connection and quality smartphones with mates poses an additional challenge, especially in areas where such resources are scarce,” he added.
Buddha said the ministry “should engage in thorough consultations with stakeholders, including worker organisations and civil society organanisations… before implementing such a crucial intervention”.
“Reports from pilots should be made publicly available. It makes very little sense to roll out a new initiative on attendance without fixing issues with the existing NMMS app,” he added.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
Also Read: Housing to jobs, all about Modi govt’s Rs 24,000 crore mission for vulnerable tribal groups