The passage of the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill, 2025 called the VB-G RAM G Bill, marks a decisive break from one of India’s most consequential social legislations. It replaced the landmark National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005, which was later named after Mahat ma Gandhi. While the government insists that the new law is a reform that raises the ceiling of guaranteed work from 100 to 125 days, this claim does not survive even cursory scrutiny. What the new Bill does, in sub stance, is far more troubling: it dismantles the justiciable right to work, recentralises control, shifts the fiscal burden to states, and weakens labour’s bargaining power in rural India.
NREGA was never just another welfare scheme. It was a legal innovation that translated Article 41 of the Constitution – the state’s obligation to secure the right to work – into an enforceable entitlement. If work was not provided within 15 days of demand, the state was legally bound to pay an unemployment allowance. Under NREGA employment was demand-driven, universal, and the right was justiciable. NREGA was a proxy for genuine unemployment insurance, a social security measure, which is still a distant dream despite the new Labour Codes. VB-G RAM G replaces this rights-based, demand led framework with a supply-driven, budget-capped scheme whose guarantees are conditional on Central allocations and administrative discretion.
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Recall that the roots of NREGA were in Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS). Born out of the devastating droughts of the early 1970s, EGS was financed through a dedicated tax on urban workers and backed by a statutory guarantee of rural employment. Its genius lay in its simplicity: work on demand, locally determined public works, and wag es paid as a matter of right. For over three decades, EGS acted as an unemployment insurance programme for rural Maharashtra. It became the intellectual and institutional template for NREGA. The design of EGS itself was inspired by pilot projects implemented in the early 1960’s, under the leadership of VS Page, a dhoti-clad Gandhian, who was the speaker of Maharashtra’s Legislative Council for a record eighteen years.
EGS also revealed a political truth that remains relevant today. By setting a floor on wages and offering workers an exit option, it reduced labour’s dependence on landlords and contractors. Unsurprisingly, it faced resistance from the land ed elite who complained about “labour shortages” and rising wages. That resistance never disappeared; it merely went underground. The new Bill’s provision allowing a 60-day pause in employment during peak agricultural seasons, ostensibly to “facilitate labour availability”, reads less like neutral policy design and more like a concession to agrarian power structures that have long resented NREGA’s impact on rural labour markets. Even at its peak, NREGA has provided a tiny fraction of total person-days of employment in rural areas. So, its distortionary impact on the labour market is overstated.
The centrepiece of the government’s defence is the increase in guaranteed employment from 100 to 125 days. But this is largely symbolic. Even under NREGA, only a small fraction of households actually received the full 100 days of work in most years. Raising the ceiling without ensureing an enforceable demand-based provision is like promising a tall er ladder while quietly removing the ground beneath it.
More importantly, the new Bill caps total expenditure through “State-wise normative allocations” determined by the Centre. Any spending beyond this ceiling must be borne by the states, following procedures prescribed by the Centre itself. A right that depends on fiscal discretion is not a right; it is a favour. By embedding budget caps in the statute, the Bill con verts a legal guarantee into a Centrally-rationed programme.
NREGA, for all its flaws, embodied a workable form of cooperative federalism. The Centre bore the full wage cost and most of the material cost, recognising that poorer states with higher unemployment also have weak er fiscal capacity. VB-G RAM G overturns this logic. The proposed 60:40 cost-sharing pattern shifts a significant additional burden onto the states, estimated at over Rs 50,000 crore annually, at a time when the fiscal autonomy of the states has already been eroded by GST and borrowing constraints. This is not merely a fiscal issue; it is a constitutional one. Employment and public works fall squarely within the State List and the domain of local self-government under the Eleventh Schedule.
Defenders of the Bill argue that NREGA was inefficient, corruption-prone, and administratively rigid. But these were problems of implementation, not of design. The response to delayed payments, biometric failures, and exclusion errors should have been institutional repair, not legal dilution.
NREGA’s most radical feature was its universality. It did not rely on poverty lines, beneficiary lists or targeting errors. Anyone willing to do unskilled manual work could demand employment. This self-targeting design minimised exclusion and leakage, a point repeatedly affirmed by empirical research. VB-G RAM G departs from this principle by allowing the Centre to notify specific rural areas where employment will be provided. A guarantee that applies only where the Centre chooses to apply it is a contradiction in terms. During the COVID-19 shock NREGA acted as a shock absorber, sustaining rural demand and preventing mass destitution. It has also raised the labour force participation of women, improved bargaining power for the poorest workers, and reduced distress migration. These were not side effects; they were central to its design. A pro gramme that modestly improves the bargaining power of labour in one of the most unequal labour markets in the world should be celebrated, not dismantled.
A nation aspiring to be “Viksit Bharat” by 2047 should be expanding the scope of social citizenship and social security, not shrinking it. Reforming NREGA was both necessary and desirable. Replacing a justiciable right with a discretionary scheme is neither reform nor progress. It is a constitutional, economic and moral step backward.
The writer is a noted economist.
