Listen to this article:

As reported by The Wire, Union rural development minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan informed the Lok Sabha on Tuesday (December 9) that 4.57 crore MGNREGS job cards were deleted across the country between 2019–20 and 2024–25, even as 6.54 crore new job cards were added in the same period.

While such figures are, in principle, verifiable on the MGNREGA management information system (MIS), their scale and internal logic warrant careful scrutiny. In a system marked by repeated deletions, re-registrations and compliance-driven churn, headline totals alone are an unreliable guide to continuity of access on the ground. 

Amidst news on the scheme undergoing significant changes, this article, however, focuses on a more recent and distinct deletion wave that coincided with the mandating of Aadhaar-based e-KYC.

When the e-KYC drive began in early October this year, Narappa, a worker from rural Kurnool, in Andhra Pradesh, was in Raichur district of Karnataka with his family, picking cotton. Nearly 1,000 workers from his district had migrated during the same week the e-KYC process began.

When asked if he had completed e-KYC, he simply said: “I don’t know… and I can’t go back now. Whatever happens, happens.”

For workers like him, the deadline was not tight – it was impossible.

In just one month, over 27 lakh workers disappeared from India’s Mahatma Gandhi National  Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) rolls. This is one of the sharpest contractions in the programme’s history – not due to falling demand or budget cuts, but because of a compressed and inflexible digital mandate. 

The Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) made Aadhaar-based e-KYC mandatory for all workers from November 1, 2025. Each worker had to register on the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) attendance app, which captures a live photo and matches it with their Aadhaar image. In effect, nearly 27.6 crore registered workers were told to complete this process immediately.

MoRD has described e-KYC as “simple, reliable, accurate and efficient” – a one-minute task meant to reduce duplication and ensure that “genuine workers” continue receiving wage employment “without disruption”.

But what unfolded on the ground was very different.

MoRD’s own circulars show how sharply the timeline was compressed. On September 10, states were informed that

© The Wire