But this is still better than if the internet works at the beginning of the day but stops working at the end. “That means there is no evidence that we worked all day and that we are at risk of losing our wages,” says Kanal. “It’s offensive.”
Often, she says, she works 15 days a month but only logs into the system for seven or eight days because the internet in her village goes down so often. “I lost pay because of it,” she says. “This is our only source of income. We cannot afford to lose money.” Her husband now often goes to the nearby towns of Thane or Vasai to look for work, she adds.
This is a common problem, according to Vinod Thackre, another assistant on the same block from Vikramgad. Since the introduction of the app, 300 workers from his village have dropped out, he says. “There were 500 who had enrolled under MNREGA when 2023 started. Now there are only 200. Many of them are now migrating to cities to find work.”
The government claims that digitizing attendance records helps curb corruption in the system. However, critics say the system doesn’t add much in terms of accountability. “There are countless examples of photos of crowds, boats, books being submitted and even accepted,” said Nikhil Dey, a founding member of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), the organization for workers’ and peasants’ power. “That means you’re not even looking at it.”
Osama Manzar, founder of the Digital Empowerment Foundation, an NGO, says the rollout of NMMS is symptomatic of the government’s belief in creating digital tools as an end in itself, without thinking about the people who are actually interacting with the consequences will have to live.
“The way our bureaucrats and policy makers approach technology, they like to show that we are technology friendly and adopt new technology,” he says. “That’s the attitude. We have to prove that we are technologically advanced.”
In 2015, Modi launched Digital India, a campaign to ensure that government services are made available to citizens electronically. Since then, Manzar believes, the government has done everything possible to make the campaign a visible success.
“It helps the government to say that we have delivered these services to millions of people digitally,” he says. “It makes for a great story internationally.” But while the sheer size of India’s population means the absolute number of people reached by these digital services seems impressive, “the government’s PR machine won’t talk about how many people were excluded in the process.”
Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia policy director at Access Now, a digital rights group, says the private sector has also driven some of the momentum. “There has been a lot of private sector influence to drive tool creation,” he says. “People develop tools to justify the use of other existing digital infrastructure, instead of looking at what people actually want.”
Chima says that while there have often been problems with the rollout of these digital services, lessons are rarely learned because no one is held accountable for failures.
