NERGA

National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) wage disbursal has become a challenge to all its stakeholders – the Government, the banks involved, and the NREGA beneficiaries.

The Government faces difficulties in managing delays in payments to the beneficiaries, as well as has to find ways to plug leakages. The partnering banks find increasing burden on existing delivery mechanisms due to the huge number of beneficiaries. The beneficiaries face problems due to delayed payments, and on many occasions have to forgo a day’s work to collect their weekly payment as disbursal happens during working hours.

Gramateller ATM provides an efficient and cost effective delivery mechanism which benefits all of these stakeholders by providing a speedy and reliable platform. Coming with biometric authentication, the drastically reduces the chances of someone else (other than the intended recipient) withdrawing the amount. The banks benefit from using a proven and cheaper delivery channel for the large volume low amount transactions, and also from increased ATM coverage. The beneficiaries now has access to banking services in their own villages at their convenient time, resulting in increased deposits – a win-win situation for banks and NREGA beneficiaries.

Vortex has pioneered the use of low cost biometric ATMs for NREGA disbursals, and the success of the deployments has been covered in Government of India’s website on NREGA.