UPSC Syllabus Topic: GS Paper 3 -Indian economy.
Introduction
The VB-G RAM G Act, 2025 reforms rural employment by expanding statutory guarantees while correcting long-standing planning and delivery gaps. It treats livelihood support and infrastructure-led rural productivity as linked goals. The focus is to make employment timely, accountable, and more reliable through stronger enforceability and better preparedness, instead of responding only after distress begins.
What is the VB-G RAM G Act, 2025?
The Viksit Bharat—Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G) Act, 2025 repeals and replaces the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) of 2005. The Act continues a statutory and justiciable guarantee of wage employment for rural households, while redesigning how planning, funds, and implementation are organised to close the gap between legal promise and on-ground delivery.
Significance of the VB-G RAM G Act
- Stronger legal guarantee: The Act keeps the statutory and justiciable right to employment, expands the entitlement from 100 to 125 days. It removes procedural clauses that weakened unemployment allowance in practice, and strengthens time-bound grievance redress.
- Demand-based work with readiness: Demand still comes from workers, but advance participatory village-level planning ensures work is ready when people ask, instead of being denied due to administrative unpreparedness.
- Decentralisation with coordination: Gram panchayats remain primary planning and implementing authorities, and gram sabhas keep approval powers. Viksit Gram Panchayat Plans are aggregated at higher levels mainly to enable coordination, convergence, and visibility across sectors.
- Consultation-based reform: The Bill is described as consultation-backed through State discussions, technical workshops, and multi-stakeholder engagement that shaped planning, convergence, and digital governance features.
- Fiscal design and cooperative federalism: The Centre’s share is said to rise to nearly ₹95,000 crore, and funding ratios (60:40, and 90:10 for northeastern and Himalayan States and Jammu and Kashmir) are framed as shared responsibility. Rule-based normative allocation is balanced with flexibility for disasters and special relaxations.
- Aligning with agriculture cycles: States can pre-notify up to 60 days in a year during peak sowing/harvesting when works will not be undertaken. Notifications can vary by district, block, or gram panchayat based on agro-climatic conditions, so the employment guarantee complements agriculture cycles.
Major Concerns of the VB-G RAM G Act, 2025
- Erosion of enforceable rights: The new law removes the obligation of the Union government to compensate workers for wage delays, despite judicial directions fixing such liability on the Centre.
- Threat to federal balance: While control is centralised, financial responsibility is shifted to States, creating risks of political favouritism and uneven access.
- Work rationing risk: Fiscal pressure on States may lead to suppression of work demand, increasing unemployment and distress-driven migration.
- Seasonal employment restriction: The provision denying work for 60 days during the agricultural season harms landless workers and women, reinforcing land, caste, and gender hierarchies.
- Illusory employment promise: The claim of 125 days of employment per household lacks credibility when average employment remains around 50 days due to funding constraints.
- Exclusion through administration: Technocratic controls, including rigid norms and digital compliance, widen the gap between workers and officials and create new spaces for corruption.
- Weak accountability mechanisms: The law introduces no new safeguards to address corruption. Existing mechanisms like social audits remain underfunded and ineffective.
Conclusion
The VB-G RAM G Act, 2025 reforms rural employment by preserving the legal right to work while correcting structural weaknesses seen over years of implementation. It expands entitlements, strengthens grievance redress, improves planning, and links welfare with development goals. Rather than dismantling the employment guarantee, it renews it through a more enforceable, coordinated, and productivity-linked framework. Its success will depend on how effectively expanded entitlements are translated into actual work without exclusion or rationing.
For detailed information on VB-G RAM G Bill – Provisions & Significance read this article here
Question for practice:
Discuss how the VB-G RAM G Act, 2025 seeks to reform the rural employment guarantee framework while addressing its structural weaknesses, and examine the key concerns associated with the new law.
Source: The Hindu
