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Bihar villagers to get smart cards

PATNA: In a major step to alleviate delays in wage payments under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday launched an “e-Shakti Financial Inclusion” scheme – the first of its kind in the country.

The scheme aims at providing about three crore villagers with ‘e-Shakti' biometric smart cards, with the Central Bank of India acting as the nodal bank in issuing payments.

The cards carry requisite information about the villagers including photo identification and will be operated on the e-Shakti smart card machine by using thumb impressions of the workers to generate payments for the requisite number of man-days.

“E-Shakti is Bihar's initiative. Earlier, the worker had to wait for seven days to get his wages. Even then, villagers in remote areas had no access to banking services of any kind,” said Mr. Kumar.

The Bihar Government had formally launched the e-Shakti programme in February last year and established a call centre for receiving complaints from villagers pertaining to irregularities in the scheme.

The government so far has distributed more than 13 lakh e-Shakti cards in 1,300 villages, while four lakh accounts have been opened in Patna district as part of the pilot project.

With the dates for the Bihar Assembly polls to be announced soon, the occasion served to render political accounts as Mr. Kumar reiterated that “development had become a poll plank” in the State and that “the ruling government [the NDA alliance] had proved it”.

In an oblique snub to the Congress, Mr. Kumar commented that while certain people accused him of bringing about development using Central funds, the money in fact was the money of the people of this country.

Quoting Mahatma Gandhi, the Chief Minister remarked that “all government authorities are trustees of the people”. “Does it really matter whether it is Delhi's [the Centre's] money or the State's? The important thing is to bring about development in which we [the NDA government] have largely succeeded,” he said.

“We are ready for the elections and are eagerly awaiting the announcement of the date,” he said expressing confidence and adding that “only those students [the opposition RJD and the Congress] who had not studied regularly during the year had cause for worry.”

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