Guest Post: Using Mobile phones to improve transparency in NREGA

This note briefly describes a proposal to improve the transparency and empower some of the stakeholders of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) by providing them with data, using simple mobile phones.

A. The Problem:

a) A constant main complaint about NREGS is its lack of transparency: workers don't know whether they have been paid their wages, they don't know if their attendance is marked in the muster. Social auditors don’t know whether funds are allocated to the scheme or not. It's also difficult to find how much budget was allocated and then utilized.

b) The above is ironical, because transparency is wired inside the implementation of NREGA: any one with a net connection and a PC can get whatever details they like about the scheme (e.g. see http://nrega.nic.in/workers/wrkinfo.asp).

c) This access to information via the PC, though laudable and helpful, is however impractical: very few workers (if at all) can be expected to log on to the Internet, navigate to the said website and obtain the necessary information, which is currently in English.

d) But many of them have mobile phones (especially the social workers doing the social audit, a pillar of NREGA), India has one of the lowest connectivity rates in the World. There are also reports of non-farm income reliant labor-force (e.g. petty shopkeepers, artisans) entering NREGA due to the ongoing drought, and they can be expected to own at least basic mobile phones.

B. The proposal:

I propose the development and usage of an SMS-based system wherein small-but-relevant information is presented to the laborers’/social auditor’s mobile phone system.
a) A non-profit agency queries and downloads the information, such as worker attendance and payment schedules, from the NREGA website onto the Cloud (the Cloud is a mechanism to store vast amount of data, usually for a very small fee).

b) A mobile-phone server is made available with a well know five digit number, like for TV reality shows. This server hosts the functionality to receive SMSs, parse the received texts to constructs queries (e.g. show attendance records), retrieve the information, and sent it via SMS to the querying mobile phone.

c) Using an SMS syntax (e.g. ATT ), a worker/social worker can query for his/her attendance, for the funds made available, etc. and gets the necessary records. The syntax could cover ten-fifteen frequently used operations.
e.g. an SMS with text 'ATT 234566 0909 ' to the well-known number in b) above, say 54567 might provide the attendance for the worker with job-id 234566 for the month of September 2009.

C. Benefit:

a) Workers/Social workers need not rely on second-hand information about their attendance records and allocation of funds, and can get the information directly from the central system. They can for themselves verify: how their attendance was recorded in the system, what payment was claimed to be made to them.
b) Some of the operational hurdles plaguing the system could be thus addressed, such as false work measurement, non-maintenance of muster rolls and job-cards.
c) In future, the system could also be integrated with the banking system IT systems (most banks already provide free account information via mobile) so that workers can be alerted about deposits from NREGA to their accounts (this is relevant for those blocks where the payment is deposited directly to their bank accounts).
Rider: every query will involve a small fee for the user (the cost of every SMS), e.g. 50 paise per query.

D. Proof of concept:

a) An SMS-based query engine has been used for Sugar co-operatives in the Warana block of the Kolhapur district in southern Maharashtra before and has reported wide success (see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/india/projects/waranaunwired/)

Any thoughts?

Posted by Bhushan Y. Nigale