A parliamentary standing committee on Wednesday said that the Aadhaar-based payment system under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme must remain optional and suggested using alternative payment mechanisms to ensure that workers receive their wages.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or MGNREGA, is a national social security scheme meant to guarantee at least 100 days of unskilled manual work in a year for every rural household.

The Standing Committee on Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, in its fifth Demands For Grants (2025-’26) report submitted in the Lok Sabha, said that technological intervention must not be made mandatory due to operational challenges that have led to the exclusion of beneficiaries.

“In several instances, workers have been wrongfully removed from the system due to discrepancies between their Aadhaar details and job card records,” noted the committee headed by Congress MP Saptagiri Sankar Ulaka.

The Centre made the Aadhaar-based payment system mandatory from January 1, 2024.

For workers to be paid under the system, their Aadhaar details have to be linked to their MGNREGA job cards and bank accounts. The Aadhaar details then need to be integrated with the database of the National Payments Corporation of India, after which the institutional identification number of the bank needs to be mapped on the National Payments Corporation of India database.

Workers have repeatedly claimed that their payments have been misdirected due to this system. Many have also said that their names have been deleted because of a mismatch between the details in their job cards and their Aadhaar cards.

On Wednesday, the parliamentary standing committee said that the Aadhaar-based payment system had “been effective in eliminating fraudulent claims and ensuring that only genuine beneficiaries receive wage payments”.

However, it added that the system should be made optional as it “would ensure that workers without Aadhaar or those facing biometric authentication issues continue to receive their rightful wages without compromising the integrity of the scheme”.

The committee said that the number of guaranteed working days under MGNREGA should be increased to at least 150 days from the current 100.

“The need of the hour is to further diversify the nature of works under MGNREGA in such a manner and through such mechanisms that could also propel the number of guaranteed working days under MGNREGA to 150 days,” it said.