Chouhan, who was addressing the inaugural session of the two-day National Rural Development Conference here on Sunday, said that even when he was chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, he could see that the MGNREGA was not meeting its objectives and, therefore, the need of the hour was to effectively implement VB G RAM G.
As one of India’s longest-running rural employment schemes comes to a close on July 1, both critics and supporters are keenly eyeing the performance of the new VB G RAM G.
The Centre has prepared an elaborate plan to ensure that the transition from the MGNREGA to VB G RAM G is smooth. It has deputed more than 100 officials to be placed in districts and talukas all over the country to see to it that MGNREGA workers don’t face any hardship in moving to the new programme. Earlier, it had directed the over 286,000 gram panchayats in India to convene special gram sabhas to explain the nuances and intricacies of the scheme to workers. Additionally, it has allocated an interim ₹95,692 crore a few weeks ago to the states.
VB G RAM G marks another milestone in India’s long history of rural employment schemes, which, according to some available literature, started from the third Five-Year Plan (1961-66), when the rural manpower programme was started to give employment in 1,000 community blocks by the end of FY65.
Since then multiple schemes and programmes have been conceived and run both at central and state levels to provide meaningful work to rural workers. All finally culminated in 2005 in the enactment of the NREGA, later renamed MGNREGA.
Since its beginnings, the MGNREGA has contributed to the transformation of India’s rural employment landscape, something which even the latest Economic Survey has accepted.
It said the MGNREGA provided wage employment, stabilised rural incomes, and created basic infrastructure, offering at least 100 days of guaranteed unskilled work to rural households.
However, over time, increasing incomes, enhanced connectivity, widespread digital adoption, and diversified livelihoods have transformed the nature of rural employment requirements, emphasising both the programme’s achievements and the need to reassess its design and aims, the survey said.
However, it said, several persistent deeper structural issues such as work not being done on the ground and expenditure not matching physical progress had crept in over time. “While delivery systems improved, the overall architecture of (the) MGNREGA has reached its limits and warranted reassessment in (the) light of evolving rural realities,” the survey said.
But, it is not that VB G RAM G is without its share of criticism.
Even before the scheme has been operationalised, several experts are questioning the very nature of VB G RAM G and its normative funding pattern, which transforms the demand-driven nature of the MGNREGS into a centrally funded programme. It also puts a burden of running VB G RAM G on the states, which might find it difficult to run such a programme without strong central support. On Sunday, the Congress claimed several states, including the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttarakhand, have raised concerns over VB G RAM G as the new law would guarantee only centralisation and further create financial stress for them.
“VB G RAM G will end guaranteed work for workers, which the MGNREGA earlier offered, because of its demand-based nature, under which workers had the right to get work within 15 days of demanding it, with a minimum guarantee of 100 days. VB G RAM G, in contrast, is allocation-based, with a 60:40 fund-sharing ratio between the Centre and the states. This means that if a state government does not release its share of funds, workers will be hit by a lack of work,” Nikhil Dey, member of the MGNREGA Sangharsh Morcha, recently said.
Civil-society groups also said the 60-day pause provision would dilute the MGNREGA’s role as a safety net and reduce the bargaining power of manual casual labour as the scheme acted as a fallback option if farms did not give them a better deal on wages. To all these points, the government states that the broadbased acceptance of the new scheme and its contents is shown by the fact that over 20 states, including some Opposition-ruled ones like Karnataka (which even filed a court case against the scheme) and Punjab (which passed a resolution against the repeal in the Assembly), have notified it while 29 states have made budgetary provisions for it. It said much of the opposition was political in nature and had little to do with workers’ rights. Politics or no politics, the MGNREGA’s real importance was widely acknowledged during times of crisis, particularly the pandemic. With the Centre itself classifying over 100 districts in the country as “highly vulnerable” this year due to a low monsoon, how far VB G RAM G can contribute in alleviating rural distress will be its test of efficiency. So also the claims of a seamless transition from the MGNREGA.
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