Applications of Public Key Watermarking for Authentication of Job-Card in MGNREGA

Nowadays different state governments and central governments have taken initiative to successfully implement E-Governance in various areas of services applying Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to provide better transparency, accuracy & security of its services to the citizens. In September, 2005, Parliament of India has passed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), to enhance livelihood security by giving at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every house-hold in rural India. E-Governance solutions helps to simplify complex manual activities and supports transparent wage payment through agencies like Bank and Post-Offices. In e-governance, information’s are exchanged between communicating parties via Internet and message may be changed, modified or destroyed by hackers during its transmission through Internet. So, information hiding is needed at the time of exchanging information via Internet. In this paper, we propose a tool, called Public-Key Watermarking algorithm, for integrity verification of Job-Card (JC) issued to individual house-hold by state governments, so that the watermark is capable enough to detect any changes made to the Job-Card by malicious users and can also identify fraudulent wage payment.