The death of a lifeline called NREGA |
The passage of the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill, 2025 marks a decisive break from one of India’s most consequential social welfare laws. It replaced the landmark National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005, which was later named after Mahatma Gandhi to become MGNREGA.
While the government claims the new law expands guaranteed work from 100 to 125 days, the claim fails the most cursory assessment. Not just that, VB–GRAMG dismantles the justiciable right to work; it 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 gave legal status to the State’s obligation — under Article 41 of the Constitution — to secure the right to work, turning it 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. The VB-GRAMG Bill replaces this rights-based, demand-led framework with a supply-driven, budget-capped scheme whose ‘guarantees’ are subject to Central allocations and administrative discretion.
EGS: a forgotten legacy
The roots of NREGA lay in Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS), born out of the devastating droughts of the early 1970s. The EGS was financed through a 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, EGS acted as an unemployment insurance programme for rural Maharashtra — and later became the........