Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) enacted in 2005, aims to enhance livelihood security of rural people by guaranteeing 100 days of wages in a financial year for adults willing to take up unskilled manual work. This initiative is unique of its kind across the globe in poverty alleviation. Around 30 lakh (3 million) assets are created annually across the country under the rural job scheme, which involves water harvesting, drought relief and flood control as preferred activities. Convergence with other schemes necessitates further transparency in database creation of MGNREGA assets.
Hon’ble Prime Minister during a review meeting had underlined for online recording and monitoring of assets to check leakages and for effective mapping of terrain for future developmental works. In view of such a mammoth scale envisaged, a systematic procedure is embarked upon for the creation of a database on these assets. The approach adopts technological interventions in terms of using mobile based geo-tagging and a Geographical Information System (GIS) based information system.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between the Department of Rural Development (DoRD), Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), New Delhi and National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), ISRO, Hyderabad, for geo-tagging of the assets created under MGNREGA, on June 24, 2016. NRSC will be developing the geo-spatial solutions on Bhuvan Geo-portal and also the mobile based geo-tagging applications for Mahatma Gandhi NREGA scheme. The entire implementation is planned in three phases and the memorandum addresses the first phase of implementation. Next phases aim to enable citizen based reporting as well as national level MGNREGA planning framework using geo-information.
Geo-tagging exercise is a national level initiative involving linking ISRO-Bhuvan with “NREGA-Soft” interface operated under DoRD by National Informatics Centre (NIC). This has to be established within a very limited time-line, which will enable access to all state implementing departments. Database of completed assets residing on “NREGA-Soft” will be pushed to Bhuvan, which in turn will be served to each data collector under Gram Panchayats. Collected data will be moderated for quality level through approved authorities at block level to ensure the precise information for online visualization. Bhuvan can facilitate a complete geographic information storage, retrieval, analysis and reporting for completed assets, with a high resolution backdrop of Indian Remote sensing Satellite (IRS) natural color images. DoRD and NRSC are closely working out the modalities of design, integration and roll out based on intensive schedules seeking compliance of high rigor.
