The replacement of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 2005, with the new Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission Gramin (VB-GRAM-G), 2025, is being projected as a reform aimed at efficiency, rationalisation and alignment with agricultural cycles. In reality, this shift represents a fundamental rollback of one of India’s most significant rights-based employment programmes. For rural women, who are already confronting shrinking employment, rising indebtedness, pervasive harassment and the collapse of social security, this transition threatens to exacerbate precarity rather than alleviate it.Findings from a recent three-state study done by the authors covering Maharashtra, Punjab and Telangana expose the fragility of women’s livelihoods in rural India.From rights to discretionThe shift from MGNREGA to VB-G RAM G is not merely a change in name but also a change from a rights-based, demand-led entitlement into a budget-capped, supply-driven scheme.Under MGNREGA, employment was legally guaranteed upon demand, with wages and most costs borne by the central government. VB-G RAM G, in contrast, limits employment to selected seasons, selected works, and selected regions, with a significantly higher financial burden placed on state governments through a 60:40 cost-sharing formula.Also read: From Gandhi to VB-G RAM G: More than a Name Change, a Dismantling of the Right to WorkThe government claims that VB-G RAM G will provide 125 days of employment, up from MGNREGA’s statutory 100 days. However, official data shows that MGNREGA has struggled in recent years to provide an average of 50 days of work per household. During COVID-19 nearly 72 lakh households (2020-21) were provided 100 days of employment but in the year 2024-25, it has come down to merely 41 lakh households which is also lower than 45 lakh households in the previous year. The number of households completing 100 days of work has steadily declined, from 10% in 2020-21 to just 7% in 2024-25, with only 1.5% achieving this threshold so far in the current year. So, to suggest that a more restricted, underfunded scheme will outperform MGNREGA is implausible. The study findings from the three states largely corroborate these data. In Maharashtra, for example, of the total number who held job cards for MGNREGA, only 9% said they received any work despite demanding it. In Telangana, the average days of work available for job card holders was 39 in Nalgonda district and 27 days in Medak district.More worryingly, chapter 2, section 6 of VB GRAM-G explicitly prohibits employment during peak agricultural seasons for up to 60 days. This provision rests on the flawed assumption that agriculture provides adequate work during these periods. Evidence from the study shows that this assumption does not hold, especially for women agricultural labourers.Flawed narrative of labour shortage vs. reality of women’s work in rural IndiaThe three states study surveyed nearly 3,000 rural women using extensive focus group discussions, in-depth interviews and survey tools. Across all three states, women’s paid work was overwhelmingly concentrated in agriculture primarily as wage labourers, but employment availability was both seasonal, informal, poorly paid and caste segregated with the average number of work days rapidly declining over time.Over 65% of women agricultural labourers reported a decline in work availability in recent years. This decline was sharper among landless women, who are entirely dependent on wage labour. Mechanisation, monocropping, the spread of weedicides, changes in cropping patterns and acquisition of agricultural land for various public purpose projects have systematically displaced women’s labour, even as male-dominated mechanised work expands.In Maharashtra, women agricultural labourers received a low average of just 123 days of work annually, with daily wages rarely exceeding Rs 200. In Punjab, the situation was even more severe: women reported receiving barely 35 days of agricultural work in an entire year with the wages ranging from Rs 300-350. Also read: How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More Than It HidesIn Telangana, women labourers received an average of around 134 days of work annually with daily wages not exceeding Rs 300 for most works in agriculture.In both Maharashtra and Telangana, paid agricultural work is concentrated in a short peak season, lasting roughly four months each year. In the areas studied in Maharashtra, this peak coincides with the harvest of soyabean and the cotton-picking season. In Telangana, employment is similarly limited to the paddy and cotton season with women workers reporting only around 60 days of work during the peak agricultural season. For the rest of the year, work availability drops sharply, leaving women agricultural labourers with few local employment options. In Punjab, majority of the women agricultural labourers get employment in paddy season only – for 36 days during paddy seedling. As the wheat cultivation and harvesting is highly mechanised, hardly 6% reported getting employment during wheat harvesting season, and that too, for 20 days only. The study shows that a majority of women agricultural labourers relied on the MGNREGA scheme to cope with the declining availability of work in agriculture even during the peak agricultural season.Denying access to this work for 60 days during the so-called peak agricultural season will further weaken the already limited work available to them. Contrary to official narratives of labour shortages, it is not MGNREGA that pulls workers away from farms; it is agriculture itself that no longer provides sufficient employment. Public employment through MGNREGA has therefore functioned as a compensatory mechanism, not a competing one. This is evident from the official data which shows that women account for 45%, 68% and 61% of total person days for Maharashtra, Punjab and Telangana, respectively. Exploitation, debt and harassment: The gendered costs of informal labourA majority of women from the study sites reported delayed wage payments, and more than a third were compelled to work extra hours without compensation. Such practices were particularly prevalent among landless women and those from Scheduled Castes, Nomadic Tribes, and Denotified Tribes, revealing the intersection of caste and gender in labour exploitation.Delayed or denied wages force women to borrow for daily survival. Many take advances against future labour from the same employers who exploit them, locking them into cycles of debt and dependency. These interlocked labour-credit arrangements sharply reduce women’s bargaining power and expose them to coercion.Also read: ‘Restrict, Dismantle, Repeal’: How Modi Government Killed MGNREGA Before VB-G Ram G Was TabledEconomic exploitation inevitably leads to different forms of violence in the non-economic domain as well. Verbal abuse, caste-based discrimination and harassment at worksites was a common experience. Single, widowed, and deserted women faced particular hostility, often being discouraged or prevented from accessing work altogether. For migrant women workers, especially sugarcane cutters from Maharashtra, conditions were even more harrowing with long working hours, lack of housing, sanitation or healthcare, and everyday verbal and physical violence.Collapse of social securitySocial protection schemes, introduced with the intention to offset labour insecurity have largely failed to reach rural women. Less than half of the women surveyed had benefited from the Ujjwala cooking gas scheme, and many could not afford refills. Health insurance coverage was negligible despite widespread indebtedness due to medical expenses. Pension coverage among widowed and single women remained extremely low.As social security fails, women absorb the shock through intensified unpaid work, distress migration, and self-exploitation. Public employment under MGNREGA has therefore played a critical role, not as a substitute for social security, but as one of the few reliable sources of cash income and dignity.Why VB-G RAM G will hurt women the mostAgainst this backdrop, the components of VB-G RAM G are particularly damaging for women. By restricting employment during so-called peak agricultural seasons, the scheme assumes the availability of farm work that women themselves report no longer exists. In states like Punjab, where women already receive less than 30 days of MGNREGA work per year, denying access during these months will further erode their livelihoods.The large farmers who employ large-scale wage labour for farm operations have been lobbying for disruption of MGNREGA work during the peak season to keep the wages depressed. The VB-G RAM G provisions which the officials claim as striking a balance between the welfare of farmers and labourers, will severely weaken the bargaining power of agricultural labour for better wages and working conditions, especially women wage workers forcing them to accept whatever is offered, reversing the demands for higher wages and gender equality in farm wage which the agricultural labour unions have been fighting for. Importantly, wage suppression is not limited to the peak season alone. In Maharashtra, sugar factories and contractors have ensured that MGNREGA remains dysfunctional during the lean agricultural months as well, compelling workers into distress migration for sugarcane harvesting. Together, these practices reveal a coordinated labour-control regime which suppresses wages during peak seasons by denying alternative employment, and disciplines labour during lean seasons by quashing public work, leaving workers with no choice but to submit to exploitative terms.The increased financial burden on states is equally troubling. Under MGNREGA, wages were fully funded by the Union government. VB-G RAM G’s cost-sharing framework places greater responsibility on states already facing fiscal stress. This will inevitably lead to uneven implementation, with poorer states generating fewer work days. Given that women consistently account for around 58% of total person-days under MGNREGA, they will be the first to lose out when employment is rationed.Finally, by replacing a legal guarantee with administrative discretion, VB-G RAM G strips women of one of their few enforceable rights. The ability to demand work, receive unemployment allowances and access grievance redressal mechanisms was central to MGNREGA’s emancipatory potential. Its removal pushes women back into informal, unregulated labour markets where exploitation is the norm.Whose development does VB-G RAM G serve?MGNREGA was never merely an employment scheme. It was a legal guarantee that recognised work as a right, enabled demand-driven access to employment, and provided bargaining power to the most marginalised workers, particularly rural women. Unlike most welfare programmes, it acknowledged women as workers, enabling women’s participation in unions and collective bargaining processes. Women became workers with enforceable entitlements rather than as residual labour or passive beneficiaries.Evidence from the study shows that even limited public employment produced tangible benefits. It reduced women’s dependence on exploitative employers, curbed distress migration, enabled collective and relatively safer worksites and provided a degree of income predictability during lean agricultural seasons. More importantly, it strengthened women’s voice and bargaining power in everyday social and economic life, which continues to be structured by entrenched relations of caste and class.The case for bringing MGNREGA back is, therefore, grounded in the lived realities of rural women navigating agrarian distress, gendered labour displacement, and the steady withdrawal of the state from social protection. If even minimal guarantees of work are withdrawn, rural women will be forced to absorb the crisis through their bodies, labour, and silence at the cost of rising debt, deteriorating health, increased violence and intergenerational poverty.VB-G RAM G is another crushing blow to women’s work, bargaining power and entitlements in the labour market which are already undermined in the Labour Codes regime – be it longer shifts, diluted state enforcement of safety standards or definition of wage work.By reversing the basic right to work that was guaranteed through the MGNREGA, it is clear that the Union government has now embarked on a vision of ‘Viksit Bharat’ that involves wilful abdication of the state from its constitutional obligation of protecting the interests of the most marginalised section of its citizens.