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Digital Divide & Corruption: How MGNREGA Fails Bihar’s Rural Workers

July 26, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

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The digitisation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was intended to enhance transparency but has instead exacerbated difficulties for digitally illiterate beneficiaries, hindering their ability to benefit from the scheme. Read on!

This is not the first time a digitally altered/created cover of TIME magazine has gone viral online and probably not the last one either.

Quick debunking tips:

  • Usually, a magazine cover carries the release/issue date of that particular edition. If you see carefully, there is no date mentioned in the viral cover.

  • Next, compare the viral cover with any official TIME cover. You will notice that a thin white border separating the iconic red frame from the photograph is missing in the viral cover.

  • Also, TIME magazine’s website has an online archive available wherein this particular cover doesn’t feature in the year 2024.

  • You can follow a similar debunking procedure for any other viral magazine cover or newspaper clipping as well.

Digital Divide and Corruption: How MGNREGA Fails Bihar’s Rural Workers

🔖 What’s wrong?: In June, the Rajasthan Unorganised Workers Union, an activist group supporting Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) workers, discovered something strange on the National Mobile Monitoring Software (NMMS) app. The app that was launched in 2021, designed for recording MGNREGA workers' attendance displayed identical images of a nondescript green bush.

The gap: The timestamps indicated that these photos were taken mere minutes apart on 17 June, yet they were all uploaded approximately four hours later, almost simultaneously. According to the activist group, who also shared these photos with Decode’s Hera Rizwan, such anomalies are not uncommon in their routine surveys of MGNREGA implementations.

Expert’s take: According to Nikhil Shenoy, an activist associated with Rajasthan Unorganised Workers Union, digitisation has led to an increased opacity instead of the promised transparency, ultimately fostering corruption. Referring to the app, Shenoy emphasised how corruption and forced digitisation have tainted the system.

Social Media Influencer To Trafficking Mastermind: The Tale of Bobby Kataria

🔖 Out of desperation: Arun Kumar, an unemployed youth from Gopalganj in Uttar Pradesh’s Fatehpur district, was desperate for a job to support his family after the death of his parents. This is when he came across social media influencer Balwant Kataria, popularly known as Bobby Kataria, on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Trapped in a nightmare: Kumar met Kataria, who promised him a job in the UAE with a salary of Rs 45,000-50,000. However, this promise came with a steep price: Rs 2 lakh as a processing fee. "Ten to fifteen days later, I got a call from him asking for Rs 50,000 more to continue the process of the job," Kumar told Decode’s Waquar Hasan.

Days after, Kumar still received no job offer. Instead, he was informed that the opportunities in Dubai no longer existed. He was asked to pay Rs 1 lakh for a different job in another country. On 28 March, Kumar was sent to Laos, a country he knew little about.

🚫 Fake News You Almost Fell For

🔍 A video showing a youth slip and fall into a river while recording a video, was shared on WhatsApp with a false claim that a young man drowned while shooting reels at a waterfall. Find out the truth in 🔗 Anmol Alphonso’s ↗️ fact-check.

🔍 A disturbing video of a woman being beaten up by a group of armed men and women was circulating with the claim that a pregnant Muslim woman was assaulted by Hindus in Manipur. Read 🔗 Swasti Chatterjee’s ↗️ fact-check.

🔍 A photo of a man and woman photographed with United States Vice President Kamala Harris at a fundraising gala by an NGO in 2016 was shared on social media with a false claim that both of Harris' parents are of Indian origin and that she is misleading people about her ethnicity by pretending to be Black. 🔗 Anmol Alphonso ↗️ debunked the claim.

🅱️ Recommends

📖 This week's recommendation is: Detect DeepFakes: How to counteract misinformation created by AI

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