From Right To Ration: How Modi’s VB-G Ram G Seeks To Discipline Rural India – OpEd

This article argues that the Modi government’s proposed VB-G Ram G Bill is not a reform of MGNREGA but a class project to dismantle the right to work and remake rural citizenship. Through a critical political-economic lens, it shows how the Bill replaces entitlement with budgetary rationing, restores landlord power, centralises authority, and rebrands welfare within Hindutva ideology. The piece situates VB-G Ram G within India’s broader turn toward  authoritarianism and calls for renewed mobilisation to defend rights-based welfare as a cornerstone of political democracy. It analyses the global crisis of welfare under authoritarian capitalism.

After forcing through four Labour Codes that weakened urban workers’ protections, the Modi government has turned to rural India. The proposed Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill — VB-G Ram G — aims to repeal the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), one of the most significant rights-based welfare laws in independent India. Sold as a modern upgrade promising “125 days of work” and faster infrastructure, the Bill in reality dismantles the legal right to employment, centralises control in New Delhi, and rebrands welfare in the idiom of Hindutva nationalism.

This is not administrative tinkering. It is a political project to remake rural citizenship — from entitlement to favour, from democratic claim to bureaucratic ration, from collective right to technocratic permission.

MGNREGA was never just another scheme. Enacted after decades of struggle by workers’ movements and the Left, it recognised something radical in a deeply unequal society: that the poor could demand work as a legal right, and that the state was bound to provide it or pay compensation. It embedded livelihood security within the idea of citizenship. VB-G Ram G seeks to bury that idea.

From Entitlement to Discretion

The core of MGNREGA lay in its demand-driven design. Any rural household could demand work, and the state had a statutory obligation to meet that demand. Funds were supposed to follow workers’ claims. This architecture transformed welfare from charity into entitlement.

VB-G Ram G reverses this logic. Under the new Bill, the Union government will fix “normative allocations” for states — ceilings that determine how much work can be generated, regardless of how many people demand it. Any expenditure beyond these limits becomes the responsibility of state governments.

In plain terms, the right to work becomes a budgetary privilege. Employment is no longer something workers can claim as citizens, but something they must compete for within centrally imposed caps. What is framed as fiscal discipline is, in reality, the legalisation of denial.

From a Marxist perspective, this marks a decisive shift in the state’s role in social reproduction. The burden of unemployment is no longer treated as a collective responsibility but as an individual misfortune, managed through rationing rather than guaranteed relief. The poor are turned from rights-bearing subjects into supplicants in a queue.

Erasing History, Branding Hindutva Welfare

The ideological thrust of the Bill is announced in its name. By erasing Mahatma Gandhi and inserting the language of “Viksit Bharat” and the resonant “Ram G,” the regime seeks to overwrite the history of popular struggle that produced MGNREGA with the symbolism of Hindutva nationalism.

This is not cosmetic. MGNREGA carries the imprint of mass mobilisation, parliamentary contestation, and Left intervention. That lineage is intolerable to a regime obsessed with claiming exclusive authorship over all that is “positive” in public life. Renaming becomes an act of political expropriation: detaching welfare from democratic struggle and reattaching it to civilisational rhetoric.

In this new narrative, welfare is no longer a right wrested from the state, but a benevolent gift of a paternal, majoritarian authority. The poor are invited to see themselves not as workers with claims, but as grateful beneficiaries of a “Viksit Bharat” defined from above.

From Demand to Budget: The Neoliberal Turn

MGNREGA forced the Centre, at least in principle, to confront unemployment as a social obligation. Even when budgets were squeezed and payments delayed, the legal right remained a site of political struggle. VB-G Ram G seeks to foreclose that struggle by making ceilings the law itself.

This reflects the deeper neoliberal logic of the present state: social policy subordinated to fiscal arithmetic, and labour protection recast as inefficiency. The state withdraws from guaranteeing livelihoods while expanding its capacity to police, monitor, and discipline the poor.

What emerges is a familiar pattern of neoliberal authoritarianism: austerity for the masses, centralisation for the executive, and ideological spectacle to secure consent.

Curtailing Year-Round Work, Restoring Class Power

One of the most regressive provisions of the Bill prohibits work during peak agricultural seasons, supposedly to ensure labour availability for farming. In practice, it openly serves the interests of landlords and rich peasants.

MGNREGA had partially altered rural power relations by giving workers an alternative to exploitative farm wages. Even limited public employment strengthened labour’s bargaining power and resisted wage suppression. By suspending work precisely when private demand is highest, the state strips workers of that leverage.

This is class legislation. It re-subordinates labour to agrarian capital by guaranteeing a captive pool of cheap labour for private farms. A publicly funded programme is thus suspended to protect private profit — a stark illustration of whose interests the state now serves.

Wages and the Architecture of Low Pay

Wages are where class power becomes material. For years, workers’ organisations and expert committees have demanded that MGNREGA wages be linked to statutory minimum wages and updated for inflation. Parliamentary committees have called for daily wages of ₹375–₹400, recognising that current rates do not meet basic living costs.

VB-G Ram G abandons even the formal commitment to such standards. It gives the Centre unchecked power to fix wages, without linking them to any law, index, or floor wage. There is no guarantee of revision, no protection against erosion by inflation.

The result is the institutionalisation of a low-wage regime within public employment itself. Instead of setting a wage floor for rural labour markets, the scheme risks becoming a mechanism to normalise depressed wages — with the state acting as a direct agent of wage repression.

Burdening States, Centralising Power

The Bill converts the programme into a centrally sponsored scheme with a 60:40 Centre–state funding ratio for most states, while also making states liable for unemployment allowance if work is not provided on time.

In a post-GST order where states have lost revenue autonomy and face chronic transfer delays, this shift is devastating. The Centre keeps control over design and priorities, while states carry the fiscal burden and political blame for failures.

This is not cooperative federalism. It is centralisation by stealth, hollowing out the constitutional balance while deepening regional inequalities — especially for poorer, labour-exporting states.

Hollowing Local Democracy

MGNREGA was anchored in decentralised planning through Gram Sabhas, giving substance to the promise of grassroots democracy under the 73rd Amendment. Villages could decide what works were needed, linking employment to local development.

VB-G Ram G replaces this with top-down planning aligned with centrally defined “national priorities” like PM Gati Shakti and a “National Rural Infrastructure Stack.” The Centre may even decide which rural areas are notified for implementation.

The village is reduced from a site of deliberation to a node in a centralised grid. Democratic decentralisation gives way to technocratic command.

Surveillance and Exclusion

The Bill also legalises the technological apparatus already imposed on MGNREGA: Aadhaar-based payments, biometric authentication, digital attendance apps, geotagging, dashboards. Workers’ organisations have repeatedly shown how these systems exclude those with poor connectivity, faulty biometrics, or simple documentation errors.

By embedding these mechanisms in law, VB-G Ram G transforms technological fragility into structural exclusion. Citizenship becomes a data-verified status, contingent on infrastructure the poor do not control. Welfare fuses with surveillance, and transparency becomes a tool of discipline.

The Illusion of 125 Days

The government’s headline promise of 125 days of work is pure spectacle. Even under MGNREGA’s year-round framework, average employment rarely crossed fifty days. With budget caps, seasonal bans, fiscal burdens on states, and centralised controls, there is no material pathway to expanding real work.

The number functions as propaganda — a symbolic surplus masking a substantive erosion.

Welfare Authoritarianism

Taken together, VB-G Ram G marks a new phase of welfare authoritarianism. It fuses neoliberal austerity with Hindutva symbolism, centralised executive power with technocratic surveillance, and class bias with cultural nationalism.

A rights-based law is replaced by a discretionary scheme. Democratic claims are traded for bureaucratic permissions. Labour is disciplined, while ideology fills the space once occupied by entitlement.

This is not an aberration. It is consistent with a broader project to remake the Indian state: weaken institutions, fragment mass claims, and reorganise consent around spectacle rather than substance.

Defending the Right to Work

For rural workers, the right to work is not an abstraction. It is the difference between survival and hunger, dignity and dependence. Its erosion restores landlord power, deepens precarity, and weakens the political capacity of the poor.

The battle over VB-G Ram G is therefore not just about preserving a programme. It is about defending a principle: that in a society structured by inequality, livelihoods must be guaranteed as rights, not dispensed as favours.

To defend MGNREGA is to defend the idea that democracy means more than voting — that it includes the material right to live with dignity.

In rural India today, the struggle for work is once again a struggle for preserving the “right to work” and battling  the fascist design of  Modi Government.