On paper, thousands are getting work under the scheme in Beed. But Scroll’s investigation found ghost workers, half-built roads and lakhs paid in wages.
On October 4, in Maharashtra 76,822 workers were marked present at worksites across 36 districts of the state. Of these, more than half – 40,267 – were from Beed alone. The number is unusually high for a single district.
To investigate, Scroll visited five sites in Beed where work orders had been issued for 47 labourers that day. We found no workers present at the sites, even though names and photographs had been uploaded on the scheme’s portal to mark live attendance.
In most cases, those named on the muster roll – the list of workers at a particular work site – were not even aware of work orders issued against their names. Nor did they know where their wages were being credited. For October 4, the wages for 40,267 workers listed ‘as working’ on site would add up to Rs 1.2 crore.
Three rozgar sevaks, who handle the muster roll and mark attendance under the scheme, told Scroll that said several gram panchayat members on Beed are complicit in scamming the system and siphoning off wages.