Post Offices in the country have opened over 110 lakh accounts in the names of the beneficiaries of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) for disbursing their wages bypassing middlemen.

Recently, the Department of Posts signed MoUs with the state governments of Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat for making payment of wages to job card holders in these states.

An important concern of the NREG Scheme is ensuring that every worker is paid his or her wages for the work done expeditiously, fully and by eliminating middlermen. To address this concern, the centre has decided that payment of wages to the workers will be made only through banks or post offices.

In order to facilitate this, the department of posts in collaboration with National Informatics Centre and public sctor telecom firm BSNL has been engaged in preparing an electronic payment system.

The highlights of this system are:

(i) NREGS workers will open their accounts in the nearest post office for payments of their wages. In order to ensure that the workers are paid the actual amount due to them, the amount of money to be paid to the workers is based on the measurement of work done and with the attendance being electronically transferred to the payment system and directly credited into the accounts of the workers without any manual intervention.

(ii) For the identification of NREGS workers at the time of making payment and providing other savings bank related services to them, Department of Posts will issue smart cards at the time of opening of accounts. These cards will work as their ID cards as well as electronic passbook. Post officews will not be able to conduct transactions on behalf of the workers without using the smart card of individual workers.

These cards will also have the photograph of the worker printed on them so as to establish the identityof the person using the card.

(iii) One of the key aspects of the software being implemented for the electronic payment system is to ensure the security of transactions made from the mobile phone being used at the post office to the central server.

A pilot implementation of this system is being planned by the government in selected districts of Orissa, which is expected to be operational by December 2008.