Introducing too much technology into the worker’s life

Source-This post on Introducing too much technology into the worker’s life   has been created based on the article “Workers, not tech, should be state’s priority” published in “The Hindu” on 30 March 2024.

UPSC Syllabus-GS Paper-2– Government Policies and Interventions for Development in various sectors and Issues arising out of their Design and Implementation.

Context-The article highlights the problems of technological intervention for implementation of MGNREGA.The author argues that the objective of MGNREGS is not to offer a playing field for technological interventions, but to provide deprived households a sense of work security.

What is Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)?

Read more- MGNREGS

What is the significance of MGNREGS?

As per scholarly study in World Development, these schemes lead to higher nutritional intake and empower women. This also pay women on par with men and serve as insurance substitutes

It empowers marginalized communities by giving them pronounced benefits and contributes to ensuring political transparency. These principles must not be sidelined by enthusiasm for technological intervention.

What are the challenges with technological intervention for implementation of MGNREGA?

There are challenges in the project of linking rural employment guarantees to digitized individual identification systems such as-

1) Sidelining the worker– There are issues related to poor internet connectivity, fingerprint recognition issues, difficulties faced by the disabled, unrecorded working days and name duplication.
Further,  there are problems such as lack of awareness, errors in linking, authentication, elimination of names, discrepancy in name spellings, and issues in seeding. In all these problems, workers have little or no fault.

2) Omission of workers– There are more than 26 crore workers registered with MGNREGS. As per research, around 5.2 crore workers were deleted from the database in 2022-23. Further, as per the article of The Hindu Newspaper, around 34.8% of job card holders were not eligible for The Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS).

What should be the way forward?

The enhanced budgetary allocation to MGNREGS must be utilized for addressing technological problems and making technology an enabler of socio-economic transformation for workers.

In the backdrop of increasing socio-economic inequality, diminishing social security, and rising rural distress, it is important to ensure that technology does not threaten any workers livelihood security.

Question for practice

Explain how technological intervention can threaten job security of MGNREGA workers.