New Delhi, July 08 : The Congress on Wednesday mounted a fresh attack on the Centre over the newly implemented Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, accusing the government of replacing a landmark rights-based rural employment guarantee with a more centralised and restrictive framework. Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh described the new legislation as “Rozgar Adhikar chori”, alleging that it dilutes the legal guarantee of work that had long formed the core of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).
Ramesh’s criticism came days after the VB-GRAM-G Act came into force nationwide on July 1, formally replacing the two decade old MGNREGA that was introduced during the Congress led UPA government. The opposition party has since sharpened its campaign against the law, portraying it not as a reform of rural employment architecture but as a rollback of worker protections, decentralised planning and livelihood security for millions of households.
In a post on social media, Ramesh shared an article by economist and former Jammu and Kashmir finance minister Haseeb Drabu, who has emerged as one of the prominent critics of the new framework. Referring to Drabu’s analysis, the Congress leader said the law had been “bulldozed through” to replace what he described as a transformational programme that had empowered rural communities and strengthened local self-governance.
According to Ramesh, the new Act strips away the constitutional spirit of the right to work embedded in MGNREGA’s design and substitutes it with a highly centralised mechanism that undermines gram panchayats and imposes an unsustainable burden on state governments. He argued that the shift is not merely administrative but structural, changing the very character of India’s rural employment support system.
The political significance of the criticism lies in the central place MGNREGA has occupied in India’s welfare architecture since its launch in 2005. Designed as a demand-driven employment guarantee programme, MGNREGA gave rural households a legal entitlement to seek up to 100 days of unskilled manual work in a financial year. If work was not provided within the stipulated time, workers were entitled to unemployment allowance. Over the years, the scheme became one of the most visible rights-based social protection measures in the country, often credited with cushioning rural distress, supporting household consumption, creating local assets and offering a fallback source of income during agricultural lean periods and economic shocks.
The Congress now argues that the new VB-GRAM-G Act fundamentally alters this character. Instead of a guaranteed, demand-led legal entitlement, it says the government has moved toward a formula-based and centrally controlled system in which decision-making is concentrated at the top and the rights of workers are weakened in practice. The party’s contention is that the transformation is not a simple rebranding exercise but a redesign of the programme’s underlying principles.
Drabu’s article, which Ramesh highlighted to bolster the party’s position, argues that MGNREGA had functioned as a rights-based scheme with a legal commitment to provide employment on demand, whereas the new law converts that structure into a centrally determined transfer model. In this view, the core shift is from entitlement to allocation from a framework where the worker and the gram panchayat were central actors to one where the Union government defines the terms more tightly and the states are left with a heavier implementation and financial load.
The Congress has framed this as an attack on both livelihoods and federalism. Its criticism has two layers. The first is economic and social: that the new law weakens job security for rural households at a time when wage stress, underemployment and agrarian uncertainty remain pressing concerns in many parts of the country. The second is political and institutional: that it reduces the role of panchayats and transfers more responsibility to states without adequately supporting them financially.
Ramesh also alleged that the government was using technology in ways that could exclude workers rather than facilitate access. Although he did not go into technical detail in his remarks, the Congress has repeatedly argued in recent years that excessive dependence on digital attendance systems, centralised verification tools and rigid technological compliance can hurt the most vulnerable workers especially in rural areas with weak internet access, patchy connectivity, biometric failures or administrative bottlenecks. By extending this critique to the new law, the party is attempting to present the legislation as one that narrows access instead of improving efficiency.
Another key charge levelled by the opposition concerns the duration and continuity of employment support. Ramesh claimed that the new arrangement is not available year round in the way MGNREGA was designed to function. The implication of this criticism is that the law may reduce the flexibility rural households once had to seek work during periods of acute distress or seasonal unemployment. For a programme that has historically served as a safety net in droughts, crop failures, migration shocks and periods of low agricultural demand, such a change would carry serious implications if borne out in implementation.
The Congress has also objected to the wage structure under the new law. When the Act came into force last week, the party demanded its repeal and called for a strengthened version of MGNREGA to be restored instead. It argued that the wages under the new framework are unjustifiably low and do not reflect the realities of inflation and rising living costs. In doing so, the party linked the debate over the law to the larger issue of rural wage justice and labour dignity.
The opposition has specifically invoked the recommendations of the expert committee headed by economist Dr Anoop Satpathy in 2019, which had proposed a methodology for fixing a just minimum wage for workers. Congress leaders have said that any serious rural employment framework should adopt those recommendations and adjust wages to account for the increase in prices since then. By tying the VB-GRAM-G debate to the Satpathy panel’s wage framework, the party is trying to shift the conversation from administrative design to the everyday economic reality of workers who depend on such schemes for survival.
At the heart of the Congress’s attack is the claim that MGNREGA was more than a welfare programme — it was a rights-based social contract between the state and the rural poor. In that framework, employment was not a discretionary grant but a legally enforceable entitlement. Gram panchayats had a meaningful role in identifying works, planning projects and responding to local needs. The new Act, critics argue, risks moving away from that bottom-up structure toward a more standardised and centrally controlled model in which local bodies lose agency and states face higher fiscal obligations.
The government, for its part, has presented the new legislation as part of a broader reorientation of rural employment and livelihood support under the Viksit Bharat framework. While the Congress sees the shift as a dilution of guarantees, the Centre is likely to argue that the law is intended to modernise implementation, improve accountability, align spending with measurable outcomes and integrate employment with broader livelihood objectives. That clash in interpretation is likely to define the political debate over the law in the months ahead.
What makes the issue especially sensitive is the social and political weight MGNREGA has carried over the years. The scheme has been one of the most recognisable anti-poverty interventions in rural India and has often served as a stabiliser during times of crisis. During drought years, economic slowdowns and the Covid-19 pandemic, demand for MGNREGA work surged as households sought a basic income buffer. Any move seen as weakening that safety net is therefore bound to trigger political resistance, particularly from parties that view rural welfare as a core electoral and ideological issue.
The Congress is clearly trying to position the VB-GRAM-G law as emblematic of what it calls the Centre’s broader tendency to replace rights-based welfare with more controlled and centralised schemes. By using the phrase “Rozgar Adhikar chori”, Ramesh sought to frame the law not as a technical policy change but as a deprivation of a fundamental economic safeguard for rural workers. The language is politically charged and designed to resonate with workers, panchayat representatives and state governments that may be wary of increased obligations without corresponding fiscal support.
The federalism dimension could become particularly important if states begin raising concerns over funding patterns, implementation conditions or the scope of their responsibilities under the new law. MGNREGA itself has often been a site of Centre-state friction over fund releases, wage payments and administrative control. If the VB-GRAM-G framework alters cost sharing or compliance structures in ways that states consider burdensome, the political contest around the law could deepen further.
There is also a larger philosophical argument embedded in the Congress critique: what should rural employment legislation in India fundamentally aim to do? Should it remain a legal guarantee of work that places the worker’s claim at the centre, even if that means open ended demand and substantial fiscal commitments? Or should it evolve into a more targeted, managed and integrated livelihood support programme with stronger central control and outcome driven design? The answer to that question will shape not just this law, but the future direction of India’s rural welfare model.
For now, the opposition has made clear that it intends to keep the issue alive. By invoking both constitutional rights and economic justice, the Congress is trying to turn the debate over VB-GRAM-G into a broader contest over the meaning of welfare, decentralisation and labour protection in rural India. The involvement of figures such as Haseeb Drabu adds an economic and policy dimension to the party’s political messaging, allowing it to argue that its objections are not merely partisan but grounded in concerns about fiscal design, institutional balance and worker exclusion.
As the new law begins its first full phase of implementation across the country, the coming months will likely determine whether the Congress’s warnings find wider resonance among states, panchayats, workers and policy analysts. Much will depend on how the scheme functions on the ground: whether wages are paid on time, whether work remains accessible to those who need it, whether panchayats retain meaningful agency, and whether states feel overburdened by the structure of financing and compliance.
The battle over the VB-GRAM-G Act is therefore about far more than nomenclature. It is about the future of one of India’s most important rural employment frameworks and about whether a programme once built on legal entitlement and decentralised participation can be transformed without eroding the rights and protections it was meant to guarantee. With the Congress stepping up its attack and the Centre pushing ahead with implementation, the political and policy contest over rural employment is set to intensify in the weeks ahead.