A recent surge in deletions from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) database has raised concerns among activists and analysts. According to a report by The Hindu, citing data from Lib Tech, a consortium of academicians and activists, while around 15 lakh deletions were recorded over six months, the number unexpectedly jumped to 27 lakh in just one month, nearly doubling the total for the previous half-year.

Why were so many MGNREGA job cards deleted?

In the first half of the 2025-26 financial year, the scheme had recorded net additions of 83.6 lakh workers, with 98.8 lakh added against 15.2 lakh deletions. However, by mid-November, net additions had dropped to 66.5 lakh, effectively removing 17 lakh workers in just one month. Notably, 6 lakh of these were active workers, defined as those who have worked at least one day in the past three years.

States with high e-KYC completion rates have been at the forefront of these deletions. Andhra Pradesh, with 78.4% of workers completing e-KYC, reported 15.92 lakh deletions, while Tamil Nadu (67.6%) saw 30,529 deletions and Chhattisgarh (66.6%) 1.04 lakh deletions.

Despite the trend, senior officials at the Union Ministry of Rural Development insisted that e-KYC completion was not directly responsible. They emphasised that verification of job cards is a continuous process, overseen by state governments and gram panchayats. Additionally, job cards must be renewed every five years, a process currently underway across the country.

e-KYC and ABPS: Tools to prevent misuse

The government introduced e-KYC as an additional verification layer to prevent misuse of the MGNREGA system. The process requires MGNREGA supervisors (mates) to capture workers’ photographs twice daily on the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS), which are then matched with Aadhaar data.

The Ministry had flagged multiple irregularities in NMMS usage, including:

  • Uploading irrelevant or unrelated photographs
  • Repeated use of the same photo for multiple muster rolls
  • Mismatch in gender composition and worker counts
  • Non-uploading of afternoon session photos

The Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS), mandatory since early 2023, also ties workers’ salaries to their Aadhaar-linked bank accounts, eliminating ghost and duplicate job cards. However, both ABPS and e-KYC have inadvertently excluded genuine workers, echoing similar deletion surges observed during the ABPS rollout between 2021-22 and 2022-23.