India’s Tech Obsession May Leave Millions of Workers Without Pay

Vaishali Kanal’s wages don’t depend on how much she works. They depend on whether there is internet in her village or not. Kanal, 25, usually leaves her toddler at home in Palatpada, a remote village in western India, early in the morning, and goes to work on a nearby building site. But when we met on a scorching May afternoon, she was cradling her daughter in her arms. “If she is awake or crying, I take her with me,” she says. “It is tough to do backbreaking labor and take care of the toddler at the same time.”

Often she puts in a whole day of grueling labor but doesn’t get paid for it, due to a glitch in a government system that was supposed to help some of the country’s most marginalized people—like Kanal, a tribal farmer from Maharashtra’s Palghar district. Kanal is a worker under the Indian government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, or MGNREGA, which gives rural workers a guaranteed income for working on public infrastructure project, such as roads, wells and dams. The aim of the scheme was to give people in rural areas employment opportunities close to home, so they wouldn’t have to move to cities to find work. With 266.3 million registered workers and 144.3 million active ones, it is probably the largest employment scheme in the world.

Until last year, workers’ attendance at their jobs was often marked on a physical muster roll by a village employment guarantee assistant or worksite supervisor. However, in January this year, the national government made it mandatory to log the attendance of workers on an app, the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS). The official on site now has to upload pictures of workers to the system to prove their attendance. But the app doesn’t work in remote areas with weak or infrequent internet connections. Critics of the policy say the lack of connectivity was an easily foreseeable problem, and that workers from marginalized groups are—not for the first time—being left behind in the government’s obsession with rolling out glossy, but poorly thought-through technologies.

“The government’s focus is not on workers, but on technology, regardless of whether it helps workers,” says Brian Lobo, an activist working in Palghar.

The Ministry of Rural Development, which oversees the MGNREGA scheme, did not respond to a request for comment.

Workers using the NMMS have to have their photos taken twice—once when they start work, and once when the day is over. “If the internet is sluggish, the photos don’t get uploaded,” said Jagadish Bhujade, a guarantee assistant in the block of Vikramgad where Kanal’s village is located. “In our block, it is always a problem.”

Kanal says that there have been days she’s rushed to work, only to find that the internet is down and there’s no way to log in. “That means I have to walk back all the way to my home,” she says. “Some of the worksites are quite far, and I can’t afford to take the bus each time.”