VB-G RAM G: The promise and pitfalls

For nearly two decades, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) occupied a distinctive place in India's policy architecture.

- AMARENDU NANDY

Its economic significance lay in a simple but consequential institutional idea that rural distress could be translated into a claim on the state. Any rural household willing to undertake manual work could demand 100 days of employment, and the administration carried a time-bound obligation to respond.

This rights-based asymmetry, with the citizen as claimant and the state as duty-bearer, made the programme more than a budgetary intervention. It functioned, however imperfectly, as insurance against volatility at the bottom of the labour market. In FY 2024-25, MGNREGS generated 2.9 billion person-days of work, with women constituting 58.15 per cent of total beneficiaries.

That architecture has now been abruptly replaced by the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G) Act, 2025, which revamps rural employment within a restructured institutional framework. The government presented the reform as modernisation: Offering more guaranteed workdays, with emphasis on durable asset creation, tighter monitoring, and closer alignment with development priorities. Yet the redesign indicates a distinct philosophical shift from a scheme designed around uncertainty to one around control.