On a blazing afternoon in July, the white heat made worse by the humidity, so that each step through the thick air required the summoning up of near-superhuman will, Pooja Devi, 33, walked for over a mile, much of it uphill. She climbed to a spot about 500 feet off the ground.

Up here, on a hill in the Aravalli Range, mountains so ancient that they trace their origins to a Precambrian event, Pooja was finally able to get her smartphone to connect to the internet.

We are about an eight-hour drive from Delhi, in a village in Ajmer, a district in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. Pooja is an official, or “mate,” responsible for helping to log the attendance of workers in a national employment scheme.

The rural workers who resort to this scheme — the “Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act” (MGNREGA) — are so desperate for jobs that the government guarantees them 100 days of unskilled manual labor in a year at barely subsistence wages. A day’s work, usually about four hours in a baking field, earns a worker less than three dollars.