New Delhi: Workers’ organisations, trade unions and grassroots activists gathered at the Press Club of India on June 17 to denounce the rules governing the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin), or VB-G RAM G, and to announce a nationwide protest campaign for July 1, the same day the new law is set to come into force and formally repeal the two-decade old Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Representatives of the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha (NSM), the All India Agricultural Workers’ Union (AIAWU), state-level labour unions and workers said that the draft rules – released on May 23 with a public feedback window that closes only on June 21, just nine days before implementation – expose chronic underfunding, vague wage protections and a continued reliance on digital systems that have already excluded thousands of workers from the rolls.Passed without consultationMGNREGA, enacted in 2005 after years of grassroots mobilisation, guaranteed a legal right to 100 days of work a year to any rural household willing to do unskilled manual labour, with payment owed regardless of whether work was actually available. Speakers at the press conference said VB-G RAM G dismantles that demand-driven, rights-based architecture and replaces it with a fixed-allocation system tightly controlled by the Union government.The Act itself was introduced in the Lok Sabha on December 16, 2025, and pushed through both Houses of parliament within three days, receiving presidential assent on December 21. Opposition MPs had objected to the hastiness at the time, alongside the dropping of Mahatma Gandhi’s name from the legislation and a clause requiring states to fund 40% of the programme. Nikhil Dey of the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha told reporters the same disregard for consultation has carried into the rulemaking stage: the rules were opened for public comment only after implementation had already been notified, leaving no real opportunity to revise them before rollout. The panel’s central demand, he said, is a complete rollback of VB-G RAM G and restoration of a strengthened MGNREGA. A funding gap makes implementation impossible The government has promoted VB-G RAM G as an upgrade, raising the guarantee from 100 to 125 days of employment a year. But activists presented an analysis arguing that the money committed falls far short of that promise, making it impossible to implement. It was noted that not one major state could currently deliver even half the promised guarantee. To actually fund 125 days per active job card, they estimated states would need additional allocations running into thousands of crores each, among them, from roughly Rs 15,939 crore for Bihar to a whopping Rs 31,013 crore for Maharashtra, the single largest shortfall in the country.B. Venkat, general secretary of AIAWU, said that this is not simply a budgeting oversight but structural: the law requires states to fund 40% of the programme (60:40 for most states, 90:10 for Himalayan and Northeastern states) months after their own annual budgets were already finalised, leaving no room to plan for the new liability. Speakers described this as an assault on federalism, noting that states with the most fiscal stress, or those seen as politically resistant to the Union government, are left to either absorb the cost or scale back work.The press conference also pointed to state-wise government data suggesting that work has been drying up even before VB-G RAM G formally takes effect. Digital attendance systemsThe human cost of biometric and app-based attendance systems carried over and is expected to deepen under VB-G RAM G, the movement’s organisers say, which is expected to fold in AI-based fraud detection alongside existing GPS-tagging and facial-recognition tools.Also read: VB-G RAM G Puts a Price Tag on the Right to Work, Replacing Demand With AllocationPinky Malli, a worker from Rajasthan, said attendance apps frequently fail to capture workers’ photographs at all, and that many worksites, often in forested or hilly terrain, simply lack the mobile network coverage needed to register attendance. “It can take one to two hours just to clock in, and that workers regularly walk away from a day’s wages because facial-recognition software does not recognise them after something as small as a haircut or a change of clothing.” Workers, she added, are expected to bear the cost of the phone and data connection themselves, even though frequent software updates tend to favour newer handsets that rural labourers often cannot afford.Madhulika Yalama, joint secretary of the Rajasthan Asangathit Mazdoor Union, cited findings from a union-led study on the rollout of electronic Know Your Customer (e-KYC) verification: workers being locked out after minor changes in appearance, and software updates occasionally causing entire worksites to vanish from the digital record. Payments, she and others said, remain unpredictable. Workers described receiving wages for six months of work despite having put in eight, with no clear recourse. The panel noted that these are not new complaints, NREGA workers have flagged failures in the existing system since itself, but added that rather than fixing them, the draft VB-G RAM G rules entrench the same technology, while adding a fresh requirement that workers re-register for new job cards linked to e-KYC, a process they said has already caused exclusion in several states during pilot rollouts.No guaranteed minimum wageThe draft rules do not specify the wage rate payable to workers or explicitly guarantee payment of statutory minimum wages. The workers’ rights activists said that if the government’s stated goal is to strengthen rural workers’ rights, a binding wage floor should be written into the rules themselves, not left to administrative discretion particularly at a time when state-level movements for higher wages are already underway.Disproportionate impactSpeakers said the changes would fall hardest on the workers MGNREGA was originally designed to protect. Roughly half of MGNREGA’s workforce nationally is made up of women, and Dalit and Adivasi households make up a significant share of beneficiaries. The transition was termed as an attack on marginalised rural communities, arguing that a centrally steered, technocratic programme leaves the people most dependent on guaranteed work with the least say in how it is run pointing out that the rule-making steering committee includes no elected representatives, civil society organisations or worker representatives, only bureaucrats.Key demandsThe organisations concluded the press conference by reiterating four core demands to the Union government:Repeal VB-G RAM G and restore a strengthened, demand-driven MGNREGA,Guarantee statutory minimum wages explicitly within the rules,Remove mandatory NMMS, facial-recognition and biometric authentication requirements for marking attendance, andStrengthen transparency, grievance redress and social audits to curb corruption without using technology as a barrier to legitimate workers’ access.What comes nextVenkat announced that beginning July 1, workers’ organisations will hold demonstrations at the village and panchayat level across the country, with further actions planned to continue “till the law is repealed.” Organisers said they were reaching out to opposition parties and sympathetic MPs to raise the issue in parliament, framing the protests as a people’s movement built from the ground up rather than a party-led campaign, given the absence of any parliamentary consultation on the rules themselves