MNREGA buckles under Digital India push

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Editor's note: On 15 March, Vinita Tigga sat with her infant daughter in her lap at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. Even as she tried to soothe her child, the 35-year-old looked tired, weary from the more-than-1,000 km train journey that she took from her village in Jharkhand, along with at least 50 other workers, mostly women, to arrive in the national capital.  Tigga has a pressing reason to be at the famous protest site. In December, she was compelled to quit work under the Indian government’s rural jobs programme, or MNREGA, after struggling too long to get regular wages because of glitches in a recently introduced app that allows workers to log their attendance.  “It is problematic for all of us. If we are unable to mark our attendance, how are we supposed to get the wages?” says Tigga, who recently took up working at a construction site for a private hospital, a job that pays Rs 250 a week. “I have not received the payment [from the government] for the last two years, except for one time in 2022 when Rs 6,000 …