Follow TNM's WhatsApp channel for news updates and story links.

Mahatma Gandhi believed that India lives in its villages. His idea of Gram Swaraj rested on the dignity of labour, decentralisation of power, self-reliant communities, and the moral responsibility of the State to ensure that no Indian is left hungry or unemployed. For Gandhi, work was not charity; it was a right inseparable from human dignity. Political freedom, he warned, would ring hollow if it failed to secure livelihoods for India’s villages.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) was the most serious attempt in independent India to translate this vision into enforceable public policy. Enacted as a legal right rather than a discretionary welfare scheme, it redefined the relationship between the rural citizen and the State.

But today, that architecture is under strain. Over the past decade, MNREGA’s legal guarantees have been steadily weakened through funding constraints, administrative centralisation, delayed wage payments, and policy restructuring. What was designed as a demand-driven right is increasingly being reduced to a capped, scheme-based intervention — even as rural distress deepens and employment insecurity grows.

It is in this context that the Indian National Congress has announced a nationwide mobilisation, ‘MGNREGA Bachao Sangram’, to be held from January 10 to February 25, opposing the proposed VB G RAM G Act and the dilution of MNREGA’s rights-based framework. The agitation is aimed at defending the Act’s constitutional intent, decentralised structure, and core guarantee of employment as a legal entitlement.

Manmohan Singh govt: Turning Gandhian ideals into law

In 2005, under Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi, the UPA government enacted MNREGA as a rights-based, demand-driven law, and not a discretionary scheme dependent on annual budgets. The Act guaranteed every rural household up to 100 days of wage employment, backed by legal accountability, social audits, and decentralised implementation through panchayati raj institutions.

The Manmohan Singh government viewed MNREGA as both an economic........

© The News Minute