A recent report highlights a significant number of workers, approximately 2.7 million, have been removed from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) database between October 10 and November 14 this year. This figure is substantially higher than the 1.05 million new names added during the same period. The substantial increase in removals has raised concerns among activists and academics. Lib Tech, a collective of activists and academics, has expressed worry over this ‘unusual’ rate of removal.
This surge in removals coincides with the central government’s push to implement an electronic Know Your Customer (e-KYC) process for all workers. The aim is to remove ineligible beneficiaries. However, Lib Tech’s analysis indicates that the number of removals in just one month has nearly doubled the total removals seen in the previous six months, which stood at around 1.5 million.
According to Lib Tech’s findings, in the first six months of the financial year 2025-26, the scheme saw a growth of 8.36 million workers. During this period, 9.88 million workers joined, while 15.2 million were removed. By mid-November, this growth figure dropped to 6.65 million, implying that 1.7 million workers were effectively removed in a single month. The analysis further revealed that 600,000 of these removed beneficiaries were active workers, defined as those who had worked for at least one day in the past three years.
Andhra Pradesh, a state with a high e-KYC completion rate, leads in worker removals, with 1.592 million workers removed after 78.4% of its workers completed e-KYC. Tamil Nadu (30,529 workers removed) and Chhattisgarh (104,000 workers removed) also saw significant numbers of removals, with e-KYC completion rates of 67.6% and 66.6%, respectively.
However, senior officials from the Union Ministry of Rural Development have denied any direct link between the e-KYC drive and the large-scale removal of names. A senior official stated that the verification of MGNREGA job cards is an ongoing process. The responsibility for this lies with state governments and gram panchayats. Job cards are also required to be renewed every five years, a process currently underway. The ministry has also issued a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for job card removal. This includes publicising job cards selected for removal, allowing beneficiaries time to appeal, and obtaining final approval from the Gram Sabha.
The e-KYC process requires MGNREGA supervisors, or ‘mets’, to take photographs of each worker and upload them to the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) app. These photos are then matched with Aadhaar data. The government introduced e-KYC as an extra layer of verification to detect potential ‘misuse’ of the NMMS platform. In July, the ministry issued a 13-page note to state governments highlighting issues found on the NMMS. These included uploading ‘irrelevant or unrelated pictures’ and ‘photo-to-photo capturing’ instead of live work photos. Discrepancies were also noted in the gender composition of workers at many worksites, identical photos for workers on the muster roll, mismatched worker photos between morning and afternoon sessions, and failure to upload photos for afternoon sessions.
The ministry had also made Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS) mandatory since early 2023. This system uses a worker’s unique 12-digit Aadhaar number as their financial address, requiring exact matches between their name, demographic details, Aadhaar, job card, and bank account. While intended to eliminate ‘invalid and fake job cards’, ABPS also led to the exclusion of many genuine workers.
Chakradhar Buddha, a senior researcher at Lib Tech, pointed out that the current pattern of removals is similar to the introduction of ABPS, which saw a 247% increase in removed workers between 2021-22 and 2022-23. He commented that each time a new Aadhaar-linked technology is introduced, like ABPS or e-KYC, it is presented as a way to strengthen verification. However, these often create new barriers for genuine workers, leading to large-scale exclusions. The rapid increase in removals associated with new technologies suggests they should not be implemented blindly without assessing their impact on workers.
