Financial Inclusion, Universal Mobility and NREGS

Irrespective of all its short comings and corrupt practices, NREGS achieved reasonable amount of success in providing gainful employment to rural farm laborers. To make this program a real success, and to achieve its end objective, corruption has to be rooted out from this program. Corruption is mainly happening at distributing wages and deciding minimum wages. This can be completely avoided if the government opened bank accounts for all the beneficiaries and directly credit their wages to respective accounts. The main bottleneck is the poor penetration of banks in rural areas; which effectively prevents branch based banking for this purpose. The best solution for this problem is providing a mobile phone to all benificiaries and maintains their bank accounts via mobile banking. The balance amount, credit and debit information can be provided as alerts to the rural population. To overcome the problem of illiteracy the same alerts can be provided as audio visual instead of plain text. Through the same channel other financial products such as insurance and ULIPS also can be distributed. It is high time that NREGS implementation agencies has to re-look at the implementation strategies to eradicate corruption and take the program to next level by achieving bigger goals beyond day to day survival for the beneficiaries.