When Mula was felled by 'financial inclusion'

“Maybe the phone does have my money,” sighed Mula, standing in the hollow of a pond she had helped dig. It was a windy winter morning, and after many months of not receiving her wages, she finally had a clue about them. Or so she thought.

In January 2018, Vikash Singh, the Additional Programme Officer (MGNREGA) of Sitapur had, after repeated protest demonstrations at his office, announced that MGNREGA wages were going to 9,877 accounts opened with Airtel Payments Bank since January 2017. These new accounts, in Singh’s words “were opened without informed and express consent” during the purchase of a new SIM card.

The uninformed consent, obtained by just ticking a box on the online customer acquisition form while doing the ‘Aadhaar-based SIM verification’, resulted in a diversion of benefit transfers to these new accounts. This rode on a seemingly harmless guideline of the Unique Identification Authority of India: that the bank account seeded last with the Aadhaar number automatically becomes the one to receive any money disbursed as a direct-benefit transfer.

Mula, a 45-year-old, unlettered member of the Pasi Dalit community, felt a dull hope at Singh’s announcement. She too had bought a phone with an Airtel SIM card in 2016. One morning, prompted by neighbours mentioning great deals on Airtel SIM cards (a Rs. 40 card with 35 minutes talk time), Mula and her son Nagraj had walked from their village, Dadeora in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh to the main market in Parsada in Machhrehta block, four kilometres away.  At the shop which sold them a mobile phone (and has since shut down) Mula was asked for a copy of her Aadhaar card, since her son did not have one. She produced hers.

“There was a small machine. I was asked to press my thumb down on it twice,” she remembers. This was in keeping with multiple government directives, the first of which was made in October 2014 by the Department of Telecommunications. It called for a customer’s Aadhaar number to be entered in the acquisition form filled in at the time of applying for a telephone/ mobile number. 

After Mula handed over a copy of her Aadhaar card, the shop-owner asked for some details which he punched into a computer, inserted a SIM card in a mobile and handed it over to the duo. They paid Rs 1,300 and, as they walked back home, an ecstatic Nagraj tried to explain its use to Mula.

Some weeks later, the phone was lost at a wedding. The phone number, which was the key to accessing the account, was eventually forgotten.

Yet, as Mula stood at the block office, protesting against the missing wages of many like her and chanting: ‘kamanewala khayega, lootnewala jayega, naya zamana aayega’ [‘the wage earner will eat, the one who loots will go, a new dawn will come’] she hoped that her wages would be found and transferred to her account in Allahabad UP Grameen Bank, Parsada. (The bank branch she had specified in her job application).

However, as January turned to February last year, there was no sign of the wages.

“We have about 3,000 active accounts, opened through the agency, with us. A representative drops off the relevant papers and we complete the formalities. Till a year ago, a copy of their Aadhaar was not necessary. Now it is mandatory. Not all such accounts have loans,” he says.

It was to such an account that Mula’s wages were diverted. Vikash Singh does not respond to why that discovery was not made earlier through the computerised database his office maintains for MGNREGA. But in February, when the protests had started to draw attention, Singh told Mula, among others, where the missing money was. 

Mula, who has since withdrawn the money and shut the account is a relieved woman. She does not question the system which brought her such distress.

“The wait was worse than death. I am glad it is over,” she sighs.