Jharkhand has for years attempted to link Aadhaar with the MNREGA wages, but it has been so riddled with oversights and payment delays that every few weeks, a new crisis is unearthed. This time it is from East Singhbhum, bordering West Bengal and Gumla district, near Chhattisgarh.

In Boram block in East Singhbhum there have been more than 250 labourers who have not got their MNREGA since August due to bank delays and seeding of the Aadhaar card to an ICICI account without the knowledge of the workers. A survey is being done in other parts of the district to find the total number. Several workers in Gumla block in Gumla have also been facing similar issues.

Fino Payment Bank had opened almost 16,000 bank accounts in ICICI for almost all of the Boram block’s workers using the NREGA Job Card as the primary identity document in 2012-13. Later in 2018, these accounts were linked to their Aadhaar cards by Fino bank correspondents through the electronic know your customer (e-KYC) process without the workers’ knowledge and then linked at the National Payments Corporation of India. It must be mentioned here that Fino Payments Bank was banned in May 2018 by RBI for being non-compliant with its operational guidelines and was later allowed to open new accounts in October 2018

The Fino bank representative claims that they did take consent for the linking but mostly such ‘consent’ is symbolic as the workers were not told of the reasons and consequences of doing so.

“Many workers already have an account in the local branch of Bank of India (BoI) which they usually operate. In the last two years, NREGA wages of several workers were credited to the ICICI Bank account (through Aadhaar Payment Bridge System), without their knowledge, and not their Bank of India account. This caused hassles and hardships to the workers as they had to make multiple trips to the BoI branch and block office before they learnt that their wages were credited to the ICICI bank accounts,” pointed out Siraj Dutta, who has been working with the Right to Food campaign for more than five years. Dutta has even written a letter to the RBI governor Shaktikanta Das on January 24, 2019, highlighting the issues with both ICICI and Fino Payments Bank.