The Union government’s new Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill, 2025, seeks to replace the nearly two-decade-old MGNREGA — India’s landmark law that gave rural households a legal right to demand work.
The proposed framework promises more jobs on paper, raising the annual guarantee from 100 to 125 days, but critics warn that it comes with a steep cost: the loss of a legally enforceable right to work and the rise of a centrally controlled, conditional scheme.
Employment under the new framework will be limited to four categories—water security, rural infrastructure, livelihood infrastructure, and disaster resilience—and will not be provided during peak agricultural seasons, when rural workers are expected to find farm employment instead.
Economist Jean Drèze told BOOM, “The new Bill effectively provides a work guarantee without any guarantee that the guarantee will come into effect.”
From A Legal Right To A Centralised Scheme
If passed, the Bill will replace MGNREGA, the 2005 law that created a legal right to work in rural India by guaranteeing up to 100 days of employment per household, with an unemployment allowance if work was denied. Despite chronic problems such as delayed wages, funding gaps, and digital barriers, MGNREGA has remained a critical safety net during lean seasons, disasters, and crises like the COVID-19 lockdowns—less for its efficiency than for the assurance that work could be demanded as a right.
The VB-G Ram G Bill changes that equation. It allows the Union government to decide which rural areas are eligible for work, instead of covering all districts by default. States will now bear a larger financial burden— 40% of total costs (10% for northeastern and Himalayan states)—and will pay the full unemployment allowance themselves.
Under MGNREGA, the job guarantee applies to all rural areas by default. The new Bill changes this by allowing the Union government to decide which rural areas will be covered. This means people living outside the notified areas may have no legal right to work at all, even if they need it, turning a universal guarantee into a selective scheme.
At the same time, the Union government would determine state-wise funding allocations each year, based on what the Bill calls “objective parameters”, without clearly spelling out how these parameters will be decided.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has called the Bill an attempt to dilute MGNREGA. The Opposition has demanded the Bill be sent to a parliamentary standing committee.
Sameet Panda, coordinator at LibTech, explained that the Bill normalises what were earlier implementation failures. Under MGNREGA, he said, workers and unions could still demand accountability because employment was a legal right. “The Bill makes the right under MGNREGA look like any other government development programme where local officers decide,” Panda said.
While bureaucratic discretion existed earlier too, he argued, the difference now is that this discretion is being legalised. “Earlier, unions could mobilise and demand work. Now, instead of learning from past mistakes, the government has doubled down on them,” he said, pointing to what he described as a faulty design that offers little protection to workers.
Pausing Work During Peak Agricultural Seasons
One of the most contentious clauses of the Bill allows states to pause employment for up to 60 days each during peak agricultural seasons. The government says this ensures farm labour availability for sowing and harvest.
Drèze described this as yet another hurdle for workers seeking employment. “The Bill puts as many spanners in the wheel as possible. This is one of them,” he said. While the pause period is meant to be limited, he warned that it could be misused and unnecessarily complicate access to work.
Panda echoed this concern, saying the provision effectively removes agency from workers who rely on the scheme. He pointed out that decisions about what constitutes a “peak season” would vary by state and could be influenced by local political or industry pressures. “MGNREGA was meant to reduce distress migration,” he said. “This Bill, by restricting work during crucial periods, is more likely to increase it.”
Both experts also questioned the claim that the Bill meaningfully expands employment by raising the ceiling from 100 to 125 days. Drèze noted that only a very small proportion of workers currently manage to get even 100 days of work under MGNREGA. “Raising the ceiling makes little difference when funding is curtailed at the same time,” he said.
In his words, it is “a red herring” meant to divert attention from deeper structural changes.
Legalising Technology, Normalising Exclusion
Another major shift under the proposed law is the formalisation of digital systems—such as attendance apps, online job cards, biometric authentication, Direct Benefit Transfer–only payments, and central dashboards—that were earlier introduced through executive orders.
Until now, exclusions caused by these systems could be challenged as implementation failures through courts, audits, or protests. By embedding them in law, critics argue, the Bill makes it easier for authorities to justify denial of work or wages as “lawful compliance”.
The Bill also formally embeds technologies such as biometric authentication and geotagging to monitor attendance and worksites.
These concerns are not theoretical. A Decode investigation showed how digitisation under MGNREGA has often deepened both exclusion and corruption. The National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) app, meant to ensure transparency, was found to be misused, with attendance marked using repeated, abstract images—such as photos of bushes—uploaded instead of workers. For many labourers, app-based attendance has meant unpaid work due to poor connectivity, lack of smartphones, or limited digital literacy.
Panda said that technology has already weakened MGNREGA in practice, and the new law only entrenches this further. “Tech has degraded the Act, and this Bill legalises it,” he said. According to him, it is not difficult to see who bears the cost. “The lowest strata are always the most deprived by such mandates,” he said, arguing that added layers of surveillance do little to address corruption.
Drawing a broader comparison, Panda pointed out that corruption in the Public Distribution System declined not because of surveillance-heavy measures, but because coverage expanded and budgets improved. “The belief that technology can magically fix corruption is flawed,” he said.
Drèze, too, warned against embedding technocratic control into the law itself. In recent years, he said, increasing centralisation and reliance on technology have already damaged MGNREGA, even leading to a resurgence of corruption rather than its elimination. “Enshrining technocracy and centralisation in the law is counter-productive,” he said.