CPI(ML) outrightly rejects the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (VB GRAMG) Bill, which the government cynically and stealthily listed as part of the supplementary agenda in the Lok Sabha on Monday. The surreptitious manner of its introduction, without any wider public debate or consultation, clearly exposes the Modi regime’s intent to dismantle the existing framework of guaranteed employment and destroy the statutory Right to Guaranteed Work enshrined in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). The BJP has always been opposed to the rural employment guarantee act and Modi government began subverting it from day one. After utilising the Act as a temporary safety valve during the Covid pandemic period, the government now seeks to bury the Act for good with this new Bill.
The new bill, sugar-coated under the guise of Viksit Bharat, strikes at the very foundation of MGNREGA by removing its statutory and universal guarantee. Under MGNREGA, every person willing to do unskilled manual work in any rural area must be provided employment. By diluting this universal guarantee, the VB GRAMG makes employment dependent on the discretionary powers of the Central government, which will notify such rural areas for state government to provide work.
An equally alarming and unjust feature of the bill is the systematic transfer of the financial burden onto the states, while the Central government arrogates all decision-making powers to itself without any accountability. Under the state-wise normative allocation policy proposed in VB GRAMG, the Central government will have arbitrary authority to determine fund allocations for the states. Further, from the earlier 90:10 ratio between the Centre and the states under MGNREGA, the Central government has now reduced its responsibility to 60 percent. The states will be forced to bear 40 percent of the burden, in addition to 100 percent of any expenditure above the normative allocation.
The bill further violates the very principle of the Right to Work through Section 6(A), which bars the provision of work for sixty days during peak agricultural seasons, as notified in advance. This regressive provision forcibly denies employment to rural workers who are willing and in need of work during this period, and will have a particularly severe impact on women workers.
Furthermore, the VB GRAMG completely undermines the importance and role of Gram Sabhas to generate work as per the local needs and demands, and instead creates a centralised ecosystem marked by technical complexity and mass surveillance. The experience with the arbitrarily imposed ABPS under MGNREGA has already shown the disastrous consequences of such centralisation, with millions of rural workers suffering from chronic payment delays and deletion of job cards due to Aadhaar linking and technical failures.
CPI(ML) unequivocally demands the immediate withdrawal of the VB GRAMG Bill and an end to all attempts to dismantle the universal Right to Work. We call for urgent and concrete measures to strengthen MGNREGA, including the expansion of guaranteed employment to 200 days per year, the revision of minimum wages to at least Rs. 600 per day, and a substantial increase in fund allocation.
--Central Committee, CPI(ML) Liberation (15 December 2025)
