On 21 December 2025, Parliament enacted a statute that may well come to be judged as one of the most consequential policy shifts in the country’s social contract since independence. The Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act — the VB-G-RAM-G Act — formally replaced the two-decade-old Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), signalling not simply a legal transition but a philosophical reorientation in how the state envisages rural livelihoods.

To the uninitiated, this may appear to be a matter of nomenclature and bureaucratic re-engineering — a familiar alphabet soup of acronyms and mission statements. But the simple question remains: is the new Act better or worse than its predecessor?

When MGNREGA was enacted in 2005, it marked the first time the Indian state enshrined a legal right to work for rural households. Under the Act, any adult in a rural household willing to do unskilled manual labour was entitled to at least 100 days of wage employment in a financial year. Should the state fail to provide work within 15 days of a request, the worker became eligible for an unemployment allowance — a provision that transformed labour from charity into a right.

The VB-G-RAM-G Act builds on this foundation but also departs from it in significant ways. At the heart of the new legislation are three central shifts. First, an expanded statutory guarantee: the Act assures 125 days of wage employment annually — an apparent improvement over MGNREGA’s........

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