Dr. Shenaz Ganai
For decades, rural employment policy in India has oscillated between compassion and constraint. It has carried the moral weight of social justice but often lacked the administrative muscle to translate intent into outcomes. In a country where nearly two-thirds of the population still depends directly or indirectly on agriculture, employment programmes cannot remain instruments of short-term relief. They must become engines of productivity, assets, skills, and dignity.
The Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Aajeevika Mission Gramin Act, 2025 (VB-G RAM G) marks precisely that shift. It represents a decisive move from a welfare first mindset to a development first framework, aligning rural employment with India’s long-term ambition of becoming a Viksit Bharat by 2047 under the dynamic leadership of PM Narendra Modi.
The empirical record of the earlier MGNREGA framework makes the necessity of reform unmistakable. Despite being a statutory guarantee of 100 days of work, the average employment actually delivered per household during FY 2021 to FY 2025 stood at only about 50.4 days. This gap between promise and delivery was not incidental. It was structural. In FY 2025 alone, an expenditure of Rs 85,334 crore supported only 5.78 crore households. Independent analysis across 18 major states demonstrates that with the same fiscal outlay, 6.64 crore households could have been supported if efficiency levels matched the best performing states. This translates into lost employment opportunities for more than 1.2 crore rural households due to leakages, fragmentation, and weak planning.
Corruption and governance failures were not anecdotal but systemic. Social audits recorded over 10.91 lakh irregularities involving approximately Rs 290 crore. Aadhaar seeding under the UPA period remained limited to about 76 lakh beneficiaries, leaving the system vulnerable to fake job cards and ghost workers. By contrast, Aadhaar seeding has now crossed 12.12 crore verified workers, sharply reducing impersonation and duplicate claims. Under the UPA era, only about 153 lakh works were completed. Under the NDA, completed works have risen to nearly 862 lakh, a more than fivefold increase, reflecting stronger execution capacity and monitoring.
Asset quality tells an equally compelling story. During the UPA years, only around 17.6 percent of works resulted in individual or livelihood linked assets. Under NDA reforms, more than 62.95 percent of assets created are individual and income generating, directly impacting household productivity. Geo tagged assets, which were virtually nonexistent earlier, now exceed 6.44 crore, enabling physical verification, satellite validation, and long term monitoring.
VB G RAM G builds on these corrections and codifies them into law. The statutory employment guarantee is raised from 100 to 125 days per rural household, a 25 percent enhancement. For Scheduled Tribe workers in forest areas, an additional 25 days is provided, directly addressing historical livelihood vulnerabilities. Unlike earlier regimes where wage payments routinely exceeded 15 days or more, the new Act mandates weekly wage payments, with automatic compensation for delays. This is a structural restoration of trust between the worker and the State.
The financial architecture of VB G RAM G is equally rigorous. The estimated annual financial implication is approximately Rs1.51 lakh crore. Funding follows a transparent and accountable 60:40 Centre State sharing model, with a 90:10 ratio for North Eastern and Himalayan states and full central funding for Union Territories without legislatures. This replaces the earlier near total central funding model that weakened state accountability. SBI research indicates that despite increased state participation, states will gain a net fiscal benefit of approximately Rs17,000 crore compared to recent MGNREGA averages, due to higher efficiency, reduced leakages, and durable asset creation.
The design of work itself has been fundamentally reengineered. More than 260 fragmented and loosely defined activities have been consolidated into four national priority verticals. These include water related works for water security, core rural infrastructure such as roads schools and health facilities, livelihood related infrastructure including storage sheds haats and skill centres, and special works for mitigation of extreme weather events. This ensures that every person day generated contributes to long term economic and ecological resilience rather than temporary earthworks.
Agricultural labour market distortion, one of the most serious unintended consequences of MGNREGA, has been decisively addressed. States are now empowered to notify a pause of up to 60 days during sowing and harvesting seasons. This provision directly protects farmers from labour shortages and wage inflation while preserving the full 125 day annual employment guarantee. It reflects a data informed understanding of rural labour cycles rather than ideological rigidity.
Administrative capacity has also been strengthened. The ceiling on administrative expenditure has been raised from 6 percent to 9 percent. This allows adequate staffing, technical planning, training, and supervision at the field level. Gram Rozgar Sahayaks, mates, field assistants, and technical staff, who form the operational backbone of rural employment delivery, can now be trained and remunerated in a manner commensurate with their responsibilities.
Transparency under VB G RAM G is no longer policy dependent. It is statutory. Biometric attendance at worksites, GPS enabled mobile monitoring, geo spatial planning, AI based fraud detection, real time dashboards, and mandatory six monthly social audits create an end to end accountability chain. Grievance redressal is digitised, time bound, and backed by district ombudspersons, failure to provide work, delayed wages, or nonpayment of unemployment allowance are explicitly recognised as enforceable violations, not administrative inconveniences.
The democratic core of rural governance has been reinforced through Viksit Gram Panchayat Plans. Planning begins at the Gram Sabha and Gram Panchayat level, with at least 50 percent of works executed directly through Panchayats. These plans are digitally integrated upward with district state and national infrastructure frameworks, including PM Gati Shakti, ensuring convergence rather than duplication. This is decentralisation with accountability, not centralisation by stealth.
The comparative record of governance outcomes underscores the credibility of this transition. During the UPA period, approximately 1,660 crore person days of work were generated. Under the NDA, this figure has risen to more than 3,210 crore person days. Central funds released increased from about Rs2.13 lakh crore under UPA to Rs 8.53 lakh crore under NDA, a fourfold increase accompanied by far stronger verification and output.
VB G RAM G therefore represents not a withdrawal of the State from rural welfare, but its maturation. It shifts the philosophy from managing distress to building capability. It aligns dignity of labour with durability of assets. It integrates village level aspirations with national infrastructure priorities. It replaces opacity with verifiable data and political rhetoric with measurable outcomes.
In the journey towards Viksit Bharat at 2047, rural India is no longer a passive beneficiary. It is an active stakeholder. The Viksit Bharat-G RAM G Act 2025 stands as a proof based, fiscally responsible, and morally coherent framework that transforms public employment from a relief instrument into a pillar of nation building. This is not merely a new employment law.It is a new social contract between the State and the rural citizen. A contract where dignity replaces dependency, data replaces discretion, and where nation-building begins from the village courtyard.
