Shillong, Apr 23: The state has made good progress in Aadhaar seeding of job cards, paving way for smooth implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in the state.
“We have improved (on Aadhaar linkage) compared to last year. However, we are yet to achieve 100% linkage of job cards with Aadhaar,” minister in-charge Community & Rural Development (C&RD) Abu Taher Mondal told reporters on Tuesday.
“Accordingly, we have instructed the block development officers (BDOs) to see that the beneficiaries should enrol for Aadhaar and Aadhaar card and job card should be seeded,” he added.
Informing that Central funds were not released due to failure in linking job cards with Aadhaar, he said the improvement in Aadhaar linkage is set to remove the bottleneck in release of payments..
“We faced a lot of problems. So, we took it up with the chief minister, who wrote to the government of India to exempt us. We got an exemption for two years with an ultimatum that henceforth there will be no more exemption,” he said.
On continuous pursuance, the Centre recently agreed to release funds for some bills, the payments of which were held up due to job card holders’ names not linked with Aadhaar, with a warning that no such bills will be entertained in future, the minister said.
Accordingly, the department has issued instructions not to generate any bill for job card holders without Aadhaar linkage, he added.
