The Union Ministry of Rural Development has ordered that the digital photographs of each NREGS work site,complete with its latitude and longitude,should be put on its website in order to ensure transparency. The instructions were issued on Wednesday,the day after Jairam Ramesh took over as the Union Rural Development Minister. Pradeep Jain Aditya,Minister of State for Rural Development,said it was Rameshs idea. The ministry has issued instructions and guidelines to the states for uploading of digital photographs on its official website through the existing system of NREGASoft,developed and managed by the National Informatics Centre(NIC). Instructions about the use of GPS-enabled equipment for defining the exact longitude and latitude of the work site are still awaited. The ministry has asked that digital photographs of each work site in three stages (i) before the start of the work; (ii) during the execution of the work; and (iii) of completed work are regularly uploaded on its website. Since it would mean heavy load on the website,the ministry has specified that each photograph should be in low resolution and should not be more than 30KB. The states would be required to upload these photographs with the dates on which these are taken,along with routine feeding of work data on Management Information System (MIS). In the same communication,the ministry has stated that it would soon introduce a system,whereby the latitude and longitude of the work site would have to be mentioned along with other details of the work site through GPS tracking. Officials said uploading photos should not be difficult as many blocks in the state have already bought digital cameras from the contingency funds for better monitoring and they already have computers for data entry,along with the required staff.
