Mentor’s Comment

The enactment of the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Aajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025 marks a decisive recalibration of India’s rural employment guarantee framework. Amid debates on fiscal withdrawal, centralisation, and dilution of rights, this article examines how the Act addresses long-standing structural and implementation gaps in MGNREGA while preserving its legal core.

Introduction

The President’s assent to the VB-G RAM G Act, 2025 enhances the statutory rural employment guarantee from 100 to 125 days. Contrary to claims of dilution, the Act seeks to correct fragmentation, weak enforceability, episodic employment, and accountability deficits that emerged during earlier phases of implementation.

Reframing Welfare and Development as Complementary

1. Conceptual Continuum: Treats income support, asset creation, agricultural stability, and long-term rural productivity as interlinked outcomes rather than competing objectives.
2. Statutory Anchoring: Retains the justiciable right to employment while strengthening enforceability through procedural reforms.
3. Design Philosophy: Embeds welfare delivery within durable infrastructure creation and productivity enhancement.

Expansion and Strengthening of Legal Entitlements

1. Enhanced Employment Guarantee: Expands guaranteed employment from 100 to 125 days, reversing stagnation in entitlements.
2. Removal of Dilutionary Provisions: Eliminates procedural disincentives that earlier nullified unemployment allowance in practice.
3. Grievance Redressal: Reinforces time-bound grievance mechanisms to address delayed payments and denial of work.

Institutionalisation of Demand-Based Employment

1. Worker-Centric Demand: Preserves demand-based employment generation, ensuring work availability when demanded rather than post-distress.
2. Advance Planning: Anchors employment planning at the village level, preventing administrative denial of work.
3. Operational Efficiency: Transforms planning into a facilitative tool rather than a demand-suppressing mechanism.

Correcting Fragmentation through Coordinated Decentralisation

1. Gram Panchayat Primacy: Retains gram panchayats as primary planning and implementing authorities with approval powers over local plans.
2. Vertical Integration: Aggregates village plans at block, district, and state levels to enable inter-sectoral convergence.
3. Decision Authority: Centralises coherence without centralising execution, correcting fragmentation while preserving decentralisation.

Fiscal Architecture and Equity-Based Allocation

1. Budgetary Expansion: Increases allocations from ₹33,000 crore (2013-14) to ₹86,000 crore (2024-25).
2. Enhanced Central Contribution: Raises the Centre’s share from ₹86,000 crore to nearly ₹95,000 crore, countering claims of withdrawal.
3. Funding Model: 60:40 Centre-State structure for general states; accords 90:10 for northeastern, Himalayan states and Jammu & Kashmir.
4. Normative Allocation: Ensures equity through rule-based state-wise allocations determined by objective parameters.

Improved Delivery Outcomes and Financial Inclusion

1. Person-Days Generated: Increases from 1,660 crore (pre-2014) to 3,210 crore, stabilising thereafter.
2. Completed Works: Expands completed assets from 153 lakh to 862 lakh, addressing episodic employment
3. Women’s Participation: Rises from 48% to 56.73%, strengthening gender inclusion.
4. Payment Efficiency: Achieves 99% on-time fund transfers; links nearly all active workers to Aadhaar Payment Bridge.

Addressing Structural Weaknesses of the Earlier Framework

1. Episodic Employment: Reduces migration-driven spikes and post-crisis employment volatility.
2. Weak Enforceability: Strengthens legal backing of unemployment allowance.
3. Leakages: Addresses duplication, ghost entries, and fake job cards through digital governance systems.
4. Crisis Resilience: Incorporates flexibility to respond to disruptions such as COVID-19.

Contextual Flexibility within Cooperative Federalism

1. Advance Notification: Empowers states to notify employment periods aggregating up to 60 days aligned with agricultural lean seasons.
2. Local Customisation: Allows differentiated notification at district, block, or gram panchayat level based on agro-climatic conditions.
3. Disaster Response: Permits temporary expansion of permissible works and employment during natural disasters.

Lessons from the previous Governance and Fiscal Failures

1. Wage Stagnation: Caps wages at ₹100 per day from 2009 despite inflation, undermining real income security.
2. Allocation Cuts: Reduces allocations from ₹40,000 crore (2010-11) to ₹33,000 crore (2012-13) amid rising demand.
3. Employment Decline: Falls from 7.55 crore workers (2010-11) to 6.93 crore (2013).
4. CAG Findings (2013): Highlights 4.33 lakh fake job cards, unpaid wages, delayed payments, and misuse of funds across states.

Conclusion

The VB-G RAM G Act, 2025 represents a calibrated structural renewal of India’s rural employment guarantee framework rather than a retreat from welfare commitments. By expanding legal entitlements, correcting fiscal and governance distortions, institutionalising decentralised planning, and improving delivery outcomes, the Act addresses the core weaknesses revealed through years of implementation experience. In doing so, it reinforces the employment guarantee as a legally enforceable instrument of inclusive growth, rural stability, and cooperative federalism, aligned with both constitutional intent and evolving development priorities.

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