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The annual village mela is in full swing in Tigra panchayat, a nondescript rural landscape lying 25 km from Ranchi. Most villagers have gone to the mela already, but two 20-something girls and a male companion wait restlessly at the deserted panchayat office. Manila Kumari, Reshma Kumari and Lela Oraon hope to catch the banking correspondent to withdraw the money they earned from community work under the MGNREGA the previous week.
Minutes later, Mahmood Alam steps in with his micro-ATM, a gadget the size of a credit card swipe machine, that allows people with the 12-digit Aadhaar number to carry out financial transactions. Alam moves to a corner of the panchayat building where mobile connectivity, essential for the device to work, is best.
Manila approaches him with her card, Alam keys in the UID and asks her to authenticate it using her thumb. She presses her thumb on the machine. Once, twice, thrice
without success. This is Manila's first attempt at a micro-ATM transaction. Alam reassures her and asks her to try again. The machine authenticates her. Her account has Rs 732, the wage the government paid her for six days of labour. She asks Alam to withdraw Rs 700 for her; the machine completes the transaction and churns out a receipt. Reshma and Lela follow the same drill.
Alam has been Tigra's window to the banking world since December. That month was when Tigra was chosen as one of the 12 panchayats in four districts of Jharkhand for the conduct of the Centre's direct payment experiment using Aadhaar. In Hazaribagh, Saraikela and Ramgarh, besides MGNREGA payments, scholarships and old-age pensions are also being paid to those with Aadhaar-enabled bank accounts.
"It works on the MGNREGA software. Over 3,000 people have got no-frills bank accounts from ICICI Bank, Bank of India and Union Bank of India. The system is running well and the authentication process has been proved," says an upbeat Sujata Chaturvedi, deputy director general, UIDAI. The pilot is going smoothly as all labourers benefiting from the project have already been issued UID cards. Their numbers are also with the block development officers, who authorise payments. Once a payment demand is raised, the amount goes directly to the banks. Aravind Prasad, in charge of UIDAI in Ranchi, says 2,535 e-transactions worth Rs 8.4 lakh have been conducted between 24 December and 24 April in the four districts. "This may not be a big number, but it shows that it works," says Prasad.
