The Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G) Act, 2025 presents itself as a long overdue correction to India’s rural employment regime. In doing so, it gives legal form to a long-standing grievance against empowered rural labour. The law’s central claim is that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) had become anti-farmer – pulling labour away from agriculture, pushing up rural wages, and creating shortages during peak farming seasons.This is not an administrative guideline. It is a legal prohibition written into the Act itself.That prohibition is given statutory form in Section 6 of the new law, which mandates a suspension of wage-employment works for up to sixty days in a financial year during the peak agricultural season to ensure the availability of farm labour.What distinguishes VB-G RAM G from MGNREGA in its treatment of agriculture is not the kinds of works it permits, but the timing of work itself. Agriculture-adjacent works such as water conservation and land development were already central to MGNREGA. The decisive break lies in the withdrawal of the employment guarantee precisely when agricultural labour demand peaks. This is the law’s only direct intervention in agricultural labour markets.Presented as a farmer-friendly reform, the suspension clause rests on a particular diagnosis: that agriculture suffers from an absence of labour, rather than from labour that is no longer cheap, pliable, and perpetually available on unequal terms. This diagnosis is less about farming and more about restoring control over labour. By suspending the employment guarantee at exactly the moment when workers’ bargaining power would otherwise be strongest, the law shifts leverage back towards employers while framing this shift as agricultural necessity.MGNREGA was already an agricultural programmeContrary to popular claims, MGNREGA has long been structurally and fiscally tied to agriculture. Since 2014, it has operated under a binding mandate that at least sixty% of all works must be agriculture and allied activities. This is not a preference but an enforcement rule: expenditure beyond this limit is not reimbursed by the Union government.Official figures themselves underline this point. Of the 266 permissible works under MGNREGA, 150 are related to agriculture and allied activities, including water-related works such as check dams and farm ponds.Works on individual lands of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households, forest rights holders, and small and marginal farmers have been prioritised across states.Adivasi households with forest pattas are eligible for up to 150 days of employment precisely because land and agriculture development in rain-fed and hilly regions requires sustained effort. The claim that MGNREGA ignored agriculture erases this enforced design feature.Yes, MGNREGA raised wages. That was the pointAny honest discussion of MGNREGA must begin with a simple acknowledgement: the programme raised rural wages. Evidence from studies and field experience shows that the employment guarantee tightened labour markets and improved workers’ bargaining power, particularly for casual agricultural labour.To treat this as an unintended distortion is to misunderstand the purpose of the law. MGNREGA was never designed merely as a workfare to absorb surplus labour. It was conceived as a floor – a publicly guaranteed alternative that would prevent rural wages from collapsing below subsistence levels. Higher wages were not a side effect. They were a policy outcome.For landless workers, Dalits, Adivasis, and women, rising wages meant fewer days of bondage, less tolerance of humiliation, and a greater ability to refuse exploitative conditions. For small and marginal farmers, the same effect often meant better returns on their own labour and a fallback during lean seasons.What is described as a farm labour shortage is, in reality, labour becoming more expensive and less submissive – a concern examined earlier in an article published in The Wire on July 4, 2018 that warned against using MGNREGA funds to subsidise farm labour.The claim that MGNREGA diverts labour away from farming rests on a false divide between farmers and workers that rarely exists on the ground. Small and marginal farmers, who form the majority of agricultural households, also sell their labour for much of the year. They work their own fields during sowing and harvesting and rely on wage labour or MGNREGA when agriculture does not provide steady employment.During peak seasons, these farmers are already cultivating their land; there is no surplus labour to be released. What MGNREGA offers is not an alternative to farming but income security that helps households meet cultivation costs, manage consumption, and avoid distress debt. Suspending the employment guarantee at this moment weakens small farmers while claiming to act in their interest.Labour, choice, and everyday powerIn a drought-prone mandal of Andhra Pradesh’s Rayalaseema region, a Dalit woman with a small patch of dry land described how MGNREGA altered her working life. Before the scheme, she depended almost entirely on farm work for dominant caste landowners. Work was uncertain, refusal often invited abuse, and lean months meant accepting whatever terms were offered.After MGNREGA, she began completing close to a hundred days of work each year on land development works near her habitation. The income was modest but predictable. More importantly, it changed her choices. She took up farm work selectively, demanded better wages, and no longer tolerated degrading treatment. As she put it, she no longer had to wait outside anyone’s house asking for work.Agricultural labour in India is overwhelmingly performed by Dalits and Adivasis, while land ownership and hiring power remain concentrated among dominant castes. When MGNREGA provided an alternative source of work, it disrupted these caste-mediated forms of control. What is framed today as indiscipline or labour shortage is often a reaction to this shift.When states supported agriculture further, they were penalisedIf the Union government’s concern was genuinely to support agriculture, recent experience suggests it has been highly selective.When Telangana used MGNREGA funds to construct paddy drying platforms that directly benefited small farmers, the Centre penalised the state, forcing it to bear a financial burden of Rs 152 crore. The issue was not whether the work supported agriculture, but whether it conformed to a narrowly interpreted rulebook.Similarly, coffee plantation works in tribal areas of Andhra, long recognised as ecologically appropriate and livelihood-enhancing for Adivasi households, were removed from the list of permissible works. These plantations provided both wage employment and long-term income security. Their removal weakened tribal agriculture while increasing dependence on casual farm labour and migration.In both instances, the question was not whether the works supported agriculture, but whether they aligned with a centrally prescribed interpretation of itThe fiction of a uniform peak seasonThe sixty-day suspension rests on a deeply flawed assumption, that agricultural labour demand is predictable, uniform, and concentrated in clearly identifiable periods.This may hold in some irrigated belts. It does not hold across most of rural India. In rain-fed and drought-prone regions, large parts of Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand and Rajasthan, there is no assured farm employment even during sowing or harvesting windows. For Adivasi households and land-poor workers, agriculture during this period often means sporadic days of work, not sustained employment. Labour demand during these periods emerges unevenly across crops, plots, and households, making it administratively impractical to align a blanket suspension of public employment with actual agricultural need.Suspending the employment guarantee in such contexts does not push workers into agriculture. It pushes them into income loss, debt, or distress migration.While the Act allows states to notify different peak seasons for different administrative units, agro-ecological diversity rarely survives bureaucratic simplification. What emerges instead is exclusion by default.Restoring hierarchy, not supporting farmingSmall and marginal farmers and Adivasi households rely on MGNREGA to develop their land and survive off-seasons. VB-G RAM G reverses the settlement that had enabled these workers to refuse exploitative conditions by withdrawing the employment guarantee precisely when their bargaining power would otherwise be strongest. If agriculture was truly the concern, policy would focus on irrigation, price stability, and input support. What the new law ultimately legislates instead is a statutory reconfiguration of rural labour markets that prioritises labour availability over income security and workers’ ability to negotiate terms of work.Sameet Panda and Chakradhar Buddha are associated with LibTech India, a centre at CORD.