All MNREGA projects in Maharashtra to be under GPS, GIS watch

In a bid to usher in greater transparency and accountability in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Gurantee Act (MNREGA) works, Maharashtra is gearing up to implement the geographic information system (GIS) to digitise and decentralise the planning, monitoring and implementation of the scheme.

GIS would enable the government to visualise and analyse the impact of NREGA with the help of real-time and micro data. Under the project, satellite images and scanned images with real world coordinates for all the projects across 28,600 gram panchayats are being created. The entire geo-tagged data of assets, such as water-sheds, farm ponds, irrigation channels and road layers, will be uploaded on a portal.

A nine-member GIS working group, headed by the secretary of employment guarantee scheme, was constituted on Monday. The move followed the Union government's June direction.
"The working group has been tasked to lay out a detailed road map, streamline the process to procure satellite images from the National Remote Sensing Center (NRSC) for each project, create a portal and geo-tag each project under the scheme," said a state government official.

Apart from effective and scientific planning, the move aims to ensure effective manpower management and validation of assets created in villages across the state. Moreover, the portal will also allow people to participate in the planning of upcoming projects and auditing of the on-going and completed projects.

MNREGA has been marred with charges of corruption, duplicacy of projects and haphazard planning since beginning. Gujarat was first in the country to implement GIS in NREGA in 2011. Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and many other states have already been working on it.

With the GIS, the Union Rural Development Ministry seeks to have an integrated view of the asset information system pan rural India. An official said, "An exclusive Bhuvan–MGNREGA Geo-portal is being established for the purpose. The NREGA monitoring will soon be available on a mobile app as well. The entire digitisation and geo-tagging of assets in all states is expected to be completed by year end."


The scheme
MNREGA ensures right to work by offering a minimum of 100 days of work in a year in rural areas, to every household in which adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Wages differ from state to state and are revised time to time, as per the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labour. At present, the wages range from Rs150-175 a day.

Under the scheme, 14 types of works are done, including water conservation and harvesting, drought-proofing including afforestation and tree plantation, irrigation canals, land development, rural connectivity, flood control, protection works and renovation of water bodies. Around 30 lakh assets are created annually under the scheme.