The Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act (VB GRAM G) represents a significant departure from the statutory framework governing rural employment for nearly two decades. Although presented as a reform of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA), the new legislation introduces several features that fundamentally alter the rights-based, demand-driven architecture of the employment guarantee.The most troubling of these is the power given to the Union government to decide, through executive notification, the rural areas where the Act will apply. As a result, access to the right to work is no longer assured across rural India, but depends on choice of the government of the day.MGNREGA as transformativeThe preamble of the Indian Constitution commits the republic to securing socio-economic justice for all citizens and ensuring dignity of the individual. However, the Constitution of India does not expressly recognise the right to work as a fundamental right. Article 41, located within the Directive Principles of State Policy, enjoins the State to make effective provision for securing the right to work.Although non-justiciable, the DPSPs were intended to guide legislative and executive action. Judicial interpretation under Article 21 progressively recognised the right to livelihood as an aspect of the right to life, most notably in Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation. However, this recognition was limited in scope. It protected individuals against arbitrary deprivation of livelihood but did not impose a positive obligation upon the State to provide employment.MGNREGA marked a decisive statutory intervention in this constitutional landscape. It translated the aspiration contained in the preamble and Article 41 into a positive, justiciable legal right. Rural households were vested with the right to demand employment, and the State was placed under a corresponding statutory obligation to provide wage employment within a prescribed period. The Act thus represented a shift from a negative conception of livelihood to a positive, rights-based framework.What the new law changes and why it mattersThe National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (“NREGA”), as it was originally enacted, was carefully structured to balance phased implementation with an unequivocal commitment to universality. Section 1(3) of the Act permitted phased implementation through executive notification, but this discretion was expressly limited by a proviso mandating that the Act be extended to the whole of rural India within five years. By 2008, this requirement had been fulfilled, and the Act applied uniformly across all rural areas.This proviso was central to the statutory architecture. It ensured that executive discretion operated only as a transitional mechanism and could not be used to permanently withhold the right. Once universalisation was achieved, notification ceased to function as a determinant of entitlement.Also read: How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More Than It HidesThe VB GRAM G Act retains the general power of notification but removes the mandatory universalisation clause. This deletion has significant legal consequences. The Union government is no longer under any statutory obligation to extend the Act to all rural areas, either within a fixed timeframe or at all. This change becomes particularly significant when read alongside Section 5(1) of the new Act, which provides that employment shall be provided only “in such rural areas in the State as may be notified by the Central Government”.In the absence of the earlier universalisation mandate, the statutory power of notification now determines the existence and reach of the ‘right’ to work. The executive is empowered to operationalise the Act selectively and to exclude other rural areas indefinitely. This change alters the character of the employment guarantee. This shift undermines the foundational logic of MGNREGA, which was designed to insulate livelihood security from political and administrative arbitrariness.Equality and (un)reasonable classificationThe notification-based framework raises serious concerns under Article 14 of the Constitution. The Act creates two classes of rural workers: those residing in notified areas, who retain access to the statutory employment guarantee, and those residing in non-notified areas, who are excluded from its protection.Under settled constitutional doctrine, a classification under Article 14 must satisfy twin conditions: it must be founded on an intelligible differentia distinguishing persons or things grouped together from others left out of the group; and the differentia must have a rational nexus with the object sought to be achieved by the statute.The classification created by the Act fails both limbs of this test. Rural workers across India are similarly situated in all constitutionally relevant aspects. The statute prescribes no objective criteria, standards or principles governing the exercise of the notification power. There is no intelligible differentia disclosed on the face of the law that explains why some rural areas are entitled to a statutory right to work while others are not.Equally, the classification bears no rational nexus to the stated object of securing rural livelihoods. A statutory framework that arbitrarily excludes certain rural populations from its operation undermines, rather than advances, the object of the Act. Access to a statutory right cannot constitutionally be made contingent on executive preference without violating the guarantee of equal protection of the laws under Article 14.Non-retrogression and the limits of legislative rollbackThe doctrine of non-retrogression rests on the principle that the realisation of fundamental and human rights must be progressive and irreversible in substance. Once the State has achieved a certain level of protection or enforceability of a right, it is restrained from adopting measures that deliberately undo that achievement. Non-retrogression thus operates as a limitation on legislative, judicial and executive power, ensuring that rights, once realised, are not withdrawn or diluted or rendered illusory through subsequent changes.This principle finds particularly strong expression in the domain of international human rights law. India is a State Party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Article 6 of the Covenant recognises the right to work as the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain a living by work freely chosen or accepted. Article 2(1) obligates States Parties to take steps, to the maximum of their available resources, to progressively realise these rights through legislative and other measures. Read together, these provisions impose a binding obligation on India to progressively realise the right to work and to refrain from measures that regress from its existing level of protection.Also read: What Labouring for One Day at an MGNREGA Worksite Taught MeThis doctrine of non-retrogression has been internalised in our domestic jurisprudence by the Indian Supreme Court in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India. The court held that the doctrine of progressive realisation of rights necessarily gives rise to a prohibition against regression. In a progressive and transformative constitutional order, the State cannot retreat from achieved levels of rights protection, nor can it adopt measures that deliberately reduce or weaken the enjoyment of rights guaranteed under the Constitution. Applying this principle, the court held that accepting the reasoning in Suresh Kumar Koushal v. Naz Foundation would amount to a retrograde step in constitutional interpretation and a denial of the progressive realisation of fundamental rights.MGNREGA represented a clear instance of progressive realisation by creating a universal, demand-driven and enforceable statutory right to work. When examined through this doctrinal lens, the changes introduced by the BV GRAM G Act constitute a clear instance of retrogression. In the absence of compelling justification, such retrogression is incompatible with both India’s international obligations and its constitutional commitment to socio-economic justice.MGNREGA was enacted to secure livelihood as a matter of right, not privilege. The power to notify rural areas may appear administrative, but in substantive terms it determines who has a right to work and who does not. This is not reform. It is rollback.Purbayan Chakraborty is a Kolkata-based lawyer.