Between October 10 and November 14, around 27 million MGNREGS workers across India were wiped out, according to the report, which described the large volume as “highly unusual”.
According to a report by Lib Tech India, a consortium of academics and activists, the flagship rural livelihoods program added about 10.5 million workers over the same period.
The report pointed out that the increase overlapped with the period when e-KYC became mandatory under the scheme from November 1, 2025, and saw a spike in deletions during the same period.
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“Such a large volume of deletions concentrated in one month is highly unusual,” said the six-month implementation report of the 2005 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), better known as MGNREGA or NREGA, is a flagship program aimed at increasing the livelihood security of households in rural areas of the country by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wages in a financial year to every household whose adult members voluntarily do unskilled manual labour.
According to the report, the national trend showed net gains for the first six months between April and September of the financial year 2025-26.
During this period, approximately 15.2 million workers were eliminated and 98.8 million workers were added, for a total increase of 83.6 million.
Net additions were about 83.6 million workers by the end of September, but fell sharply to 66.5 million workers by Nov. 14 after a sharp increase in attrition, the company said.
The year-long trend has reversed this month.
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“This means that the system effectively lost approximately 17 million network workers in one month, a dramatic reversal of the previous trend,” the report said.
The report also pointed out that there was also a decline of about six million active workers – those who actually got employment under MGNREGA for at least one day in the last three years.
“This suggests that workers currently participating in the program are also affected,” the report said.
According to the Ministry of Rural Development, e-KYC, or electronic-Know Your Customer, is mandatory for all active MGNREGS workers to weed out ineligible or bogus beneficiaries.
The report also pointed out that a spike in deletion of MGNREGS job cards was seen when the Aadhaar-based payment system (ABPS) was implemented.
MGNREGA job cards involving more than 5.48 million workers were cleared in 2022-23, a jump of 267 percent compared to 2022-21 when job cards involving 1,49,31,801 workers were cleared, according to a written reply by the Ministry of Rural Development in the Lokti Sabha in December 2023. NREG as an optional payment was first introduced in the Mahat Sabha and ABPS. method in 2016 and became mandatory from 1 January 2024.
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The Lib Tech India report also said that while the data does not show a uniform pattern across states, a “clear and disturbing trend” emerges when looking at states with the highest e-KYC completion.
The top three states in e-KYC completion are Andhra Pradesh with 78.4 percent e-KYC and 15,92,903 deletions; Tamil Nadu, with 67.6 percent e-KYC and 30,529 deletions; and Chhattisgarh, which has 66.6 percent e-KYC and 1,04,310 deletions, it said.
While the Ministry of Rural Development commented on the report, a senior official said that e-KYC cannot be linked to deletion of cards and job cards cannot be deleted on the basis that a worker is not eligible for APBS or e-KYC. The official added that deletion of job cards is a regular exercise carried out by states and Union Territories (UTs).
Under ABPS, the Aadhaar details of the worker are deployed with their employment card and bank account. It must also be mapped with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) database and the concerned bank’s Institutional Identification Number (IIN) should also be mapped with the NPCI database.
According to data on the Ministry of Rural Development’s website, e-KYC has so far been done for around 39.81 per cent of the total workers under MGNREGS and 55.01 per cent of the active workers.
According to government data, there are 27,64,56,185 workers under MGNREGS and Aadhaar seeding has been done for 22,94,69,620 workers. The total number of active workers is 12,17,48,395 and Aadhaar seeding has been done for 12,13,41,804 workers.
