In a move that has drawn sharp criticism from experts and activists, the Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sought to overhaul the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), a globally unique programme that provided a legal right to employment for the country’s rural poor. The scheme, enacted in 2005, had generated over 2 billion person-days of work annually for around 50 million households, with more than half of the workers being women and 40% coming from Dalit and tribal communities.
The MGNREGA had been praised for its ability to stabilise incomes, raise rural wages, expand women’s bargaining power, and reduce internal migration. Households could demand up to 100 days of paid work at a statutory minimum wage, effectively turning employment into an enforceable right. However, the Modi government has now replaced this rights-based system with a centrally managed welfare scheme, VB-GRAM G, a shift that has been opposed by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and inequality scholar Thomas Piketty.
The new plan, according to Jean Drèze, the architect of MGNREGA, centralises power while offloading responsibility. The central government gains discretion over when and where the scheme applies, caps funding, and shifts financial risk to Indian states. Crucially, if the scheme is “switched off”, the failure to provide work is no longer illegal. This, as Drèze argues, is “like providing a work guarantee without any guarantee that the guarantee applies”.
The old system had its flaws, including inefficiency, underfunding, and corruption. However, experts argue that the answer was reform, not repeal. Poorer states, facing new liabilities, may simply ration access to avoid paying out, effectively denying the rural poor the right to work that they had previously enjoyed.
This move by the Modi government echoes its previous attempt to introduce three “farm bills” in 2020 that aimed to shift Indian agriculture toward a more market-based model. Those bills were ultimately repealed in 2021 after year-long protests, as farmers were furious that protections they relied on were taken away without consultation.
Drèze and others are now backing grassroots protests, insisting that the right to work still exists and must be honoured. The potency of this movement lies with female workers who, through MGNREGA, learned to claim wages and work – not charity. As with the farm protests, women’s presence turns technocratic disputes into moral reckoning. If work is denied because of Modi’s new caps, discontent in the courts, states, and streets could again align, as it did before the farm bills fell.
The stakes are high, as employment guarantee schemes become crucial crisis buffers when monsoons fail. Indian states such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra, which are drought-prone and electorally pivotal, could see rural distress translate into electoral judgments if a weak monsoon hits in 2026-27 under the limited and discretionary new scheme. The Modi government’s attempt to dismantle this rights-based programme risks a rural revolt, with far-reaching political consequences.
