A disservice to dignity of labour

BARRING TRANSPARENCY IN IMPLEMENTATION & SOCIAL AUDITS, NEW LAW UNDERMINES MGNREGA ENTITLEMENTS

- NIKHIL DEY ARUNA ROY

ON MONDAY, WITH no prior consultation, the central government scheduled the introduction of a Bill to repeal the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and replace it with the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-GRAM G) Bill, 2025.In fact, this Bill should have been two different pieces of legislation, because the MGNREGA and VB-GRAM G are fundamentally different in scope and objective.

The Bill replaces MGNREGA's basic entitlement to ask for work. In fact, there is no element of the right to work-although the object and reasons of the Bill are stated as "a bill to establish a rural development framework aligned with the national vision of Viksit Bharat @2047 by providing a statutory guarantee of 125 days' wage employment in every financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to undertake unskilled manual work".

GRAM G undermines the fundamental guarantees that MGNREGA provided: A central government-funded, demand-driven employment programme, guaranteeing 100 days of work per household, anywhere in rural India. It repeals the MGNREGA and its statutory guarantees, replacing it with a central government scheme that provides no guarantees at all. It actually takes us back to the days before MGNREGA, when programmes like the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (JRY) and the Employment Assurance Scheme provided no more than a name of rural employment "assurance" and gave less than 10 days of work in most parts of India.

Just four provisions of the proposed law will make it clear how false the statutory guarantee is. It is worth examining the key legal sections and subsections of the Bill and understanding their implications.