Rejected payments continue to hamper the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MNREGA) program due to authentication failures or bank/payment system problems, a report by LibTech India said. In the last five years, at least ₹5,000 crore payments to MNREGA beneficiaries were rejected due to fundamental issues in how the government has implemented digital payments and Aadhaar authentication for the scheme, it said. The survey covering 1947 respondents across four blocks in three states, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Jharkhand, found that issues with Aadhaar seeding has lead to the exclusion of many MNREGA from accessing their wage . The report found that 30% of all the surveyed people experienced at least 3 biometric failures in the last 5 transactions they made to withdraw their MNREGA wages whether through banks, ATMs, Banking Correspondents (BCs) or Customer Service Points (CSPs). "Each state government should set up a system to monitor rejected payments regularly and ensure that they provide prompt support to resolve grievances. They should include members from the UIDAI, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and banks so that workers do not suffer due to the lack of coordination among these agencies," the report says. It found that payments were rejected either due to three broad reasons: local administration data entry errors such as incorrect Aadhaar and bank account linking Bank issues like dormant accounts, joint accounts, closed accounts Aadhaar issues could include delinking of Aadhaar , mismatch of names, non compliance of Know-Your-Customer norms, Findings of the survey Transparency 11%…
