When Parliament enacted the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in 2005, it fundamentally altered the relationship between the Indian state and its poor living in the villages. It changed the definition of employment and the right to work was no longer a matter of administrative or fiscal convenience; it became a legal right under the Act. Any rural household could demand work from the government, and failure by the state to provide employment guaranteed a statutory obligation to pay unemployment allowance to the household asking for work. MGNREGA stood out as a totally different scheme, establishing itself as a rights-based intervention which was deeply rooted in decentralisation, transparency, and social accountability in India, long used to scheme-based welfare.
Two decades later, the proposed Viksit Bharat—Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin), VB—G RAM G Bill, 2025 introduced on December 16 in the Lok Sabha seeks to repeal and replace this landmark legislation and is being framed as an alignment with the national vision of Viksit Bharat @2047.
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 was born in a moment of democratic clarity. The Bill was passed by Parliament on September 5, 2005. MGNREGA converted employment into a statutory, enforceable right. Section 3 of the Act imposed a binding obligation on the state to provide at least 100 days of work on demand, while Section 7 made the failure to do so fiscally costly through an unemployment allowance. This legal architecture mattered as it imposed liability on the government. During the COVID-19 lockdown alone, MGNREGA generated over 389 crore person-days in 2020-21, the highest since its inception, acting as the country’s largest shock absorber when markets collapsed.
The VB-GRAMG Bill, introduced in Parliament on December 16, undeniably expands the formal scope of rural employment. Section 5 enhances the statutory entitlement by guaranteeing “not less than one hundred and twenty-five days of wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work”, an increase of 25 days from the 2005 Act that responds directly to rising livelihood insecurity. More interestingly, Section 4 redefines the nature of permissible works by explicitly including “creation of climate-resilient rural assets, water conservation and management structures, drought and flood mitigation works, and works for mitigation of extreme weather events and disaster risk reduction”, thereby including climate adaptation at the core of the employment framework. All this is taken up through a new planning architecture that, in the mandate, says that Viksit Gram Panchayat Plans are to be prepared using geospatial mapping and then taken up into a national rural infrastructure framework, supported by technology-enabled monitoring, real-time digital dashboards and automated audit systems under Sections 14 and 24. These are not just cosmetic changes. Heatwaves, floods and erratic monsoons are no longer occasional events in our country. India has experienced its hottest February in 2023, repeated severe heatwaves in 2024, and a steady rise in extreme rainfall events, with the India Meteorological Department forecasting that there may be a threefold increase in heavy rainfall days over central India since the 1950s. These events directly translate into job loss for low wage workers and by explicitly listing climate-linked works in the statute itself, the Bill for the first time clearly acknowledges a lived reality for millions of workers in India.
The most consequential change in the new Bill is how employment is taken up and how unemployment is understood. Under MGNREGA, demand came first and planning followed thereafter. This was reflective in Section 3 of the 2005 Act that made it clear that if an adult member of a rural household demanded work, the government was legally bound to provide it. If it failed, an unemployment allowance was to be paid to the worker. This translated as planning, budgeting and approvals being adjusted to people’s need for work, not the other way around. But the proposed VB-GRAMG Bill reverses this logic. Section 4 introduces normative State-wise allocations to be determined by the central government as part of an annual planning exercise and explicitly states that any expenditure beyond these approved limits shall be borne by the state government. This change has deep consequences for rural India where employment is a rare opportunity. The right to work, that survived two decades through the Act, is now being weakened in practice.
This shift becomes even clearer in Section 6 of the Bill, which mandates that works “shall not be undertaken for a period not exceeding sixty days during peak agricultural seasons”. Such a restriction did not exist in the 2005 Act, which left the choice of work entirely to rural households whenever they wanted to do it. While the statement and purpose of the Bill says that it has been done to ensure availability of agricultural labour, the provision assumes significance as it creates the assumption that public employment draws workers away from farming. My experience suggests the opposite. Most MGNREGA workers are marginal farmers or landless labourers who turn to public works under NREGA precisely when they do not have anything to do and their agricultural incomes are low, uncertain, or delayed. A legal ban on work during certain months limits their choices and does not protect livelihoods. It replaces this rights-based framework under the Act with a behavioural tone decided by the state and the arrangement of workers deciding when they need employment to one where the state decides when the poor are allowed to work and when they are not.
In the end, we all believe that MGNREGA was never perfect. There were wage delays, uneven asset quality in the works undertaken and also administrative leakages. But its beauty was in the moral clarity the Act held, which was if the state could not provide work, it had to compensate the worker. This principle held the government accountable.
A truly forward-looking approach under the Bill would be to retain the demand-driven guarantee of the 2005 Act and integrate climate-resilient planning without weakening worker autonomy. India’s rural poor do not need a new vocabulary of development. They need the certainty that when work is demanded, the law will stand with them—not with the balance sheet.
Abhay Tomar is Research Associate, Office of Member of Parliament; Director, PALIPRAYAS Foundation, and former LAMP fellow 2024-25
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth