New Delhi: Amid a heated discussion around the Union government’s decision to introduce the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB – G RAM G) Bill, 2025, in the parliament, to replace the UPA-era Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), official data has showed that more than 16.3 lakh workers were removed from the NREGA scheme rolls recently. According to a report by The New Indian Express, the deletion of workers from the rolls happened over a span of 36 days a month before the bill was tabled in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, December 16.The data, pertaining to the period between October 10 and November 14 this year, has raised concerns among rural labourers and experts about exclusion from a law that guarantees the right to work, the report states.The data was revealed by Kamlesh Paswan, minister of state for rural development, in a written reply to queries in the Lok Sabha raised by Samajwadi Party MPs Lalji Verma and Anand Bhadauriya. The minister said that the deletion of job cards was a routine exercise carried out by state governments under the MGNREGS rules. The removals, he added, were due to fake or duplicate cards, permanent migration of workers, urban reclassification of panchayats and deaths, while issues like digital verification requirements, such as electronic know-your-customer (e-KYC) process, were not a cause for the removals.However, the opposition, which has already been staging protests over the new bill, said that the latest wave of deletions coincides with the introduction of Aadhaar-based e-KYC verification processes started earlier this year. Also read: As VB-G RAM G Bill is Railroaded Through Parliament, MGNREGA’s Historical Context is ForgottenAccording to the report, they pointed to reports estimating that during the same period a much larger number of workers were deleted – close to 27 lakh – which coincided with the tightening of e-KYC compliance.Paswan’s reply, on the other hand, stated that more than 56% of active workers have already completed e-KYC requirements till November and nearly 99.7% of active records had already been verified through Aadhaar seeding.MGNREGA, introduced in 2005 by the Congress-led UPA government, guaranteed every rural household 100 days of work based on demand for work, and it was funded by the Union government.Meanwhile, the new bill proposes to establish a rural development framework “aligned with the national vision of Viksit Bharat @2047, by providing a statutory guarantee of 125 days of wage employment in every financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to undertake unskilled manual work”.However, the bill also seeks to reduce the Union government’s responsibility in wage payments from a 90:10 to a 60:40 share, and provides for a period – aggregating to sixty days in a financial year and covering the peak agricultural seasons of sowing and harvesting – during which works under the new system, shall not be undertaken.The deletion figures form part of a long trend. Earlier on December 9, Union rural development minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had informed the Lok Sabha that 4.57 crore MGNREGS job cards have been deleted across the country between 2019-20 and 2024-25, even as 6.54 crore new job cards were added in the same period.Chouhan too said job card deletion is a “regular exercise” carried out by states and Union Territories, and that neither of the newly mandated digital systems – the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS), which captures real-time, geo-tagged attendance, nor the Aadhaar Payment Bridge System (APBS) – were grounds for job card deletion. Meanwhile, opposition members have vehemently opposed the replacement VB-G RAM G bill from the introduction stage itself, accusing the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government of erasing Mahatma Gandhi’s name in its “obsession” with changing names. They alleged that the proposed legislation sought to dismantle the legal guarantee for the right to work by reducing it to any other centrally sponsored scheme, while placing its financial burden on states.Despite the protests, the bill has been passed in both houses of the parliament.