The Right To Work Was Never A Slogan: Why Replacing NREGA Is A Step Back |
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 pieces of social legislation. It replaced the landmark National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005, which was later named after Mahatma 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 substance, 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.
The 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 the NREGA, employment was demand-driven and universal, and the right was justiciable. The NREGA was a proxy for genuine unemployment insurance, a social security measure which is still a distant dream despite the new labour codes. The VB-G RAM G Bill replaces this rights-based, demand-led framework with a supply-driven, budget-capped scheme whose guarantees are conditional on central allocations and administrative discretion.
The forgotten legacy of Maharashtra’s EGS: Recall that the roots of the NREGA were in Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS). Born out of the devastating droughts of the early 1970s, the 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 wages paid as a matter of right. For over three decades,........