The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was not merely a welfare programme. It was one of India’s most pioneering democratic interventions.
Anchored in the Gandhian vision of Swaraj, decentralisation, and the dignity of labour, the Act institutionalised a bottom-up, demand-driven approach to rural development. It empowered citizens to demand work as a legal right, strengthened Panchayati Raj institutions, and ensured that economic decision-making flowed from villages upwards rather than from distant bureaucratic centres.
Economically, it explicitly empowered deprived and vulnerable sections of society. Socially, it advanced democratic participation and social justice; nearly 50 per cent of beneficiaries were women and members of marginalised communities. Attempts to weaken or dilute this framework, therefore, strike at the very foundations of participatory governance and rural empowerment.
The proposed VB–GRAM G, introduced in the name of “convergence, empowerment, and growth” to supplant MGNREGA, paradoxically represents a trajectory towards divergence, centralisation, and disempowerment. Measures rhetorically framed as reforms increasingly distort the scheme’s original architecture and hollow out its rights-based character.
MGNREGA was designed as a demand-driven programme. When people demand work, the State is legally and constitutionally obligated to provide it. This principle ensured that employment generation responded to local realities, seasonal distress, and community needs.
The proposed changes, however, invert this logic. In the VB-GRAM G, Chapter 5, Section 22, is clearly intended to dismantle the scheme. By vesting the Union government with the power to determine state-wise “normative allocations” and impose rigid ceilings on expenditure, the programme is transformed into a fixed-budget, supply-driven, centrally controlled scheme.
States are now expected to bear additional financial burdens—including up to 40 per cent of wage costs, down from the earlier 90:10 ratio to 60:40—while the Centre retains unilateral authority to frame rules and impose limits. Any expenditure beyond centrally fixed allocations must be borne entirely by the states. This further undermines the Act’s demand-driven nature, effectively paralysing MGNREGA.
These amendments reflect the BJP regime’s disinterest in rural empowerment and its hostility towards Gandhian values. This arrangement fundamentally undermines cooperative federalism. Authority without responsibility, and responsibility without authority, is not federalism; it is coercive centralisation. A demand-driven employment guarantee cannot survive when fiscal autonomy and administrative flexibility are systematically eroded.
MGNREGA’s strength lay in its decentralisation and community participation. The emerging framework sidelines local institutions and weakens their role, with decision-making increasingly flowing from the Centre. States and villages are reduced to passive recipients rather than active participants.
Such centralisation directly contradicts the Gandhian principle of Swaraj—self-governing villages as the backbone of Indian democracy. This is not mere administrative tinkering; it is a political regression that erodes grassroots democracy and hollows out decentralisation.
One of the most alarming provisions prohibits MGNREGA work during “peak agricultural seasons” for up to 60 days, reducing the potential employment window from 365 days to nearly 305 days a year. This artificial restriction directly suppresses employment demand.
It amounts to a violation of workers’ rights, coercing beneficiaries into limited labour options. It also weakens workers’ bargaining power over wages, disproportionately affecting landless labourers and increasing the likelihood of distress migration. For millions of rural households, MGNREGA remains the last line of economic protection.
The scheme has been instrumental in poverty alleviation and economic stabilisation. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), 27 crore Indians were lifted out of poverty between 2005 and 2015. MGNREGA has reduced distress migration, stabilised rural incomes, and ensured the circulation of money at the grassroots.
Inadequate budget allocations, frozen wages, and delayed payments will inevitably deepen rural poverty and push workers back into precarious, cheap, and exploitative labour markets.
Furthermore, the new scheme puts women and vulnerable Communities at significant Risk. MGNREGA has been among the few public programmes that consistently enabled women’s workforce participation, ensured equal wages, and provided employment close to home.
In FY 2025–26 (till date), women accounted for 56.75 per cent of person-days generated; in FY 2024–25, 58.8 per cent; and in FY 2023–24, 58.9 per cent. Dalits, Adivasis, and other marginalised communities have relied on the scheme for income security and dignity.
Diluting MGNREGA disproportionately harms these groups. Reduced employment, exclusionary mechanisms such as Aadhaar-based payment systems, and chronic delays in the release of funds systematically push the most vulnerable out of the system.
These consequences are neither gender-neutral nor caste-neutral; they reinforce entrenched hierarchies and deepen structural vulnerabilities.The ruling regime claims the number of working days will be increased to 125. In reality, the average number of days of employment provided per household remains far below this figure.
In FY 2025–26 (till date), it stands at only 35.96 days; in FY 2024–25, 50.24 days; and in FY 2023–24, 52.8 days.The scheme has already been under sustained attack due to inadequate funding allocations, problems with the Aadhaar-based payment system, and delayed wage payments.
A report by LibTech India noted that by April 7, 2025, 27.5 per cent of all workers and 1.5 per cent of active workers remained ineligible for ABPS. Wages have remained stagnant. In FY 2025–26 (till date), the average daily wage rate per person is merely ₹267.11; in FY 2024–25, ₹252.68; and in FY 2023–24, ₹235.63.
Long-standing demands to substantially increase budgetary allocations, raise minimum wages to ₹400 per day, and extend guaranteed employment to 150 days have been consistently ignored. Against this backdrop, claims of convergence and growth appear dubious; in reality, the proposals point towards divergence and disempowerment.
Worse, this is an Ideological departure that undermines democracy. The attempt to erase Mahatma Gandhi’s name from the programme is neither symbolic nor administrative; it is a deliberate ideological act. Gandhi’s presence in MGNREGA was integral to its ethical and democratic foundation—dignity of labour, decentralisation, moral accountability of the State, and Swaraj as participatory self-governance.
The removal of this nomenclature exposes the RSS–BJP’s enduring hostility towards Gandhian philosophy and the values it inspired. Gandhi’s vision of village republics and economic justice is directly opposed to authoritarian centralisation, technocratic control, and market fundamentalism. Erasing his name from India’s most consequential rights-based rural employment programme is an attempt to delegitimise constitutional morality itself—justice, equality, and fraternity—and to recast the State’s obligations to the poor from enforceable rights into discretionary charity.
In this sense, the dismantling of MGNREGA is not merely administrative or fiscal, but a conscious ideological departure from the democratic and constitutional soul of the Indian Republic.
The weakening of MGNREGA cannot and must not be viewed in isolation. It coincides with the impending implementation of the four Labour Codes, which have diluted collective bargaining, weakened trade unions, and tilted the balance decisively in favour of employers.
Together, these measures expand the pool of cheap, unprotected labour. By dismantling employment guarantees in rural India while eroding labour protections, the State facilitates a race to the bottom—one that disproportionately benefits crony capitalists in an era marked by cronyism, monopolisation, and extreme wealth concentration. Given that the majority of India’s workforce consists of informal and unskilled workers, this trajectory has devastating implications.
The MGNREGA was never about fiscal generosity. It was about Democratic responsibility—the State’s duty to ensure the right to livelihood, social justice, and substantive equality. To dismantle the scheme is to undermine one of India’s most significant democratic experiments in economic empowerment.
Preserving MGNREGA in both letter and spirit is essential to safeguarding federalism, decentralisation, and social justice. A republic committed to justice, equality, and fraternity cannot afford to abandon its rural poor, silence their demands, or centralise power at the cost of democracy itself.
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to [email protected]
