Why 27,000 foot soldiers of the Digital India initiative caused a massive traffic jam in Mumbai

On July 25, thousands of street protesters took over South Mumbai’s arterial DN Road, causing traffic jams for several hours on a busy afternoon.

The protesters were data entry operators engaged in village-level e-governance work for the state. They had travelled from across Maharashtra in the hope that their massive rasta roko (street blockade) would compel the media and the government to address their long-standing problems: poor and irregular wages and the lack of job security as contract workers on a government programme.

Instead, most of the media in Mumbai completely ignored the protest. The Times of India’s report on the rasta roko berated the civic authorities for allowing such unions to trigger “unacceptable” traffic jams and hold commuters to ransom. Barring a few Marathi newspapers, there was no explanation for why nearly 17,000 data entry operators felt the need to organise a disruptive agitation in the heart of the city.

The state government, meanwhile, convinced the protesters to disperse after promising them that their basic demands would be met. “[Rural development minister] Pankaja Munde assured us that our salaries would be raised and that we would be given permanent jobs under a different government agency,” said Siddheshwar Munde, president of the Rajya Sanganak Parichalak Sangathan (state data entry operators’ union), which had organised the protest. “We were told that a government resolution to that effect would be issued within two or three days.”

Since this assurance, though, the promised government resolution is yet to be issued, and officials in the state’s rural development department seem unsure about how 27,000 data entry operators will be compensated for several months of unpaid work over the past year.

The story of Maharashtra’s data entry operators

In 2010, at the start of the 13th Finance Commission, the Maharashtra government and Tata Consultancy Services launched MahaOnline, a joint venture agency meant to provide a range of online services for citizens. These included government services like applying for PAN cards, income or caste certificates, online admission into state-run educational courses and applying for government jobs.

In 2011, the state made MahaOnline the implementing agency for Sangram (short for Sanganakiya Gramin Maharashtra), an “e-panchayat” project aimed at digitising government documents, improving online citizen services at the village level and enabling panchayats to use information technology for governance and funds management. This is now a key aspect of the central government's Digital India project at the grassroots level.

To carry out the ground-level work at individual Sangram centres across rural Maharashtra, MahaOnline hired 27,000 data entry operators on a contract basis in April 2011. These operators, men and women in their 20s, were predominantly graduates and had computer skills. But the salaries they received were between Rs 3,500 and Rs 3,800 a month – roughly the minimum wage for semi-skilled labourers in the state.

“Actually, the Finance Commission had allotted Rs 8,000 per month for each employee for our wages and stationery, but we received much less than that,” said union leader Siddheshwar Munde, a 27-year-old data entry operator from Beed district’s Parli town.

For the first two years in the job, operators claim they received their full salaries, but not always on time. “Then in 2013, we stopped getting proper monthly wages and they started paying us on the basis of the amount of work we did,” said Rahul Petkar, 30, a data entry operator from Solapur district. Petkar still managed to make around Rs 3,000 a month because he worked at a big panchayat where there was always a lot of work. “But in other smaller villages, people got as little as Rs 500, Rs 1,000, Rs 2,000 a month – and even that money would come once in three-four months. Sometimes we had to protest outside the district MahaOnline office to get paid.”

That year, Munde decided to form the Sanganak Parichalak union when he realised that data entry operators across Maharashtra were facing similar problems. The union boasts of representing all 27,000 operators employed for Sangram. “We have approached the state government several times with complaints that MahaOnline has been withholding money they owe us,” said Munde. “The government has never responded to this but we will now take our fight to the courts.”

No wages since November

On December 31, 2015, MahaOnline’s contract period for Sangram ended with the end of the 13th Finance Commission period. Technically, that meant the end of the data entry operators’ employment contracts as well. In anticipation of this, the operators’ union had been organising several protests all of last year, demanding wages of Rs 10,000-15,000 a month and the security of permanent jobs as government employees. Their protest outside the Nagpur Assembly in December 2015 received considerable media attention after stone pelting and police lathi charge left several protesters injured.

Rural development minister “Pankaja Munde came to our December protest and assured us that in the new financial year, we would be paid Rs 4,500 a month and that a government resolution would be issued about that in January 2016”, said Petkar. “We were told that the funds would come from the 14th Finance Commission, and that we should continue our work on the ground even after December.”

But no such government resolution was issued in January and for the past seven months, data entry operators claim their situation has been desperate. “MahaOnline hasn’t paid many of us for our work in November and December 2015,” said Petkar. “We weren’t paid from January to March either. Since April, some of us got paid Rs 4,500 for a couple of months, some got less than that and others didn’t get paid at all.”

Petkar has been sustaining his family by setting up an alternate mobile phone recharging business. “Most of us are not being able to put in many hours at the Sangram centres now, but there is a huge amount of e-panchayat that eventually needs to be done,” he said.

A bittersweet response

Despite several attempts, Scroll.in was unable to reach any spokesperson from MahaOnline for a comment. Scroll sent several email messages to the company's official address, phoned its main number and visited its office in Lower Parel but was barred from entering.

In state government offices in Mumbai, officials did not comment on the pending payments due to the data entry operators. “They were contract workers, not government employees, and they were not expected to work after the contract with the implementation agency [MahaOnline] ended in December,” said a rural development department official who is not authorised to speak to the media. “But now their salaries are going to be increased. A government resolution will come out in a few days.”

In a statement submitted to the Assembly on July 25, Pankaja Munde stated that the “next phase” of the Sangram project – under the name “Aaple Sarkar Seva Kendra” – will be implemented jointly by the rural development department, the state Directorate of Information Technology and CSC SPV e-Governance Services India Ltd, a central government initiative that will be the implementing agency in place of MahaOnline. The statement claimed that data entry operators would now get paid Rs 6,000 a month for running the Aaple Sarkar centres. “This decision has been passed by the state government,” a spokesperson for Pankaja Munde told Scroll.in.

“We had demanded wages of at least Rs 10,000. But when Pankaja tai showed us this statement after our protest, we were told that we would get paid beyond the Rs 6,000 salary if we did additional work,” said Siddheshwar Munde, who still believes data entry operators deserve the status and benefits of government employees. “As of now we are satisfied with the government’s decision but we won’t believe it till they actually issue a formal government resolution.”