New Delhi: The press conference held at the Press Club of India in New Delhi on December 17 was unlike many others, possibly because of the unusual composition of the people on stage. Those who have fought the hardest for the legal right of India’s poor to work – people like development economist, Jean Dreze. and woman’s rights leader, Annie Raja – sat along alongside those who have benefited from it, such as Kamala Devi and Shravani Devi, rural workers from Beawar district in Rajasthan.They had come together to protest the scuttling of MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) by the Modi government. The 2005 law which legally guarantees at least 100 days of paid manual work per year to the rural poor is now in danger of being replaced by the strangely worded ‘VB -G-RAM-G’ (Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission Gramin) Bill, which, besides destroying rural Indians’ demand-driven and hard-won guaranteed right to work, also undermines the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act of 1992 that recognises and empowers village-level democracy.Additionally, the VB – G RAM G Bill violates fiscal federalism and centralises control with the union government while palming off the fiscal burden to the states. It also unleashes technocratic surveillance on the workers.The meet against the dismantling of the MGNREGA at the Press Club of India. Photo: Rohit Kumar.Economist Prabhat Patnaik, calling the dismantling of the original MGNREGA “reprehensible”, reminded the audience that not only had a huge amount of thought and discussion gone into the drafting of the MGNREGA (initially called NREGA), but it had also been unanimously passed by all political parties in parliament! “The nation willed this Act into being,” he said. “You cannot undo legislation like this even if you have a majority in parliament!”Also read: ‘Replacing Father of Nation with G Ram G’: Govt Pushes Ahead to Table VB-G Ram G Bill in Lok Sabha Amid UproarPolitical leader Annie Raja pointed out how people from several walks of Indian society – women, students, youth, farmers, workers, and civil society activists – contributed to the struggle to make MGNREGA a reality, a fact that many today are not aware of. Raja also highlighted the humane thinking undergirding the law: “It was women’s organisations who insisted that the children of women workers should be looked after while their mothers work and creches and daycare centres for children were envisioned. Before MGNREGA, annual Panchayat budgets barely reached five to ten thousand rupees; after its implementation, allocations soared into the lakhs.”Raja continued:“This government keeps harping on ‘development’, but let me tell you what development really means for a rural woman in India. Some time back, an elderly woman came up to me in a village and held up a small girl’s frock, saying, ‘I was able to buy this for my granddaughter because of MGNREGA. Before MGNREGA, I didn’t even have the money to buy a bindi and if I wanted to buy clothes for my granddaughter, I had to take a loan or ask the male members of my family for the money. After MGNREGA came into being, I have been able for the first time to buy my granddaughter a frock with the money that I have earned and saved.”Sharing the stage with Jean Dreze, Annie Raja and Prabhat Patnaik was Kamala Devi, a resident of Beawar district. She said:“No one else in my family earns. Only I do. Under MGNREGA I manage to get work for 100 days a year, though many like me only manage to get 40 to 50 days of work a year. I am paid Rs 281 a day. For 30 days of work I manage to earn about Rs 8,500. In an entire year I barely earn Rs 28,000. But at least I can earn that much because of MGNREGA. Is the government going to take that away from me too by deciding when and when I cannot work?”The panelists also lambasted the VB- G-RAM-G Bill’s 60-day “no-work” clause, saying it fundamentally weakens the idea of a legal job guarantee and shifts the scheme’s priorities away from workers’ survival needs. “A job guarantee means work on demand,” explained the prominent development economist Jayati Ghosh. “By legally allowing the state to suspend work for up to 60 days, the Act itself authorises non-provision of employment, even if people need income urgently. This turns a right into a conditional welfare scheme.”Drawing attention to the unholy speed with which the Modi government is trying to pass the law, she said: “This government is now turning the people’s right to food and the right to work into a gift from the government, to be dispensed at its discretion and magnanimity. We can be sure that this will be used to further the politics of discrimination.”Economist Jean Dreze, who has played an integral role in the creation of MGNREGA, said: “If there was one thing India could have truly boasted about becoming a vishwaguru in, it was a scheme like MGNREGA, but now even that is in danger of becoming a thing of the past. I firmly believe, though, that other countries will adopt similar schemes one day.”Sounding a warning bell about the VB – G RAM G bill’s “switch-off clause”, under which the central government can decide where and when this scheme comes into force, he said: “This defeats the entire purpose of employment guarantee. It’s like saying I give you a work guarantee, but I don’t guarantee that the guarantee will be in place.” Dreze also exhorted state governments to pay attention to what he called the government’s “dangerous discretionary powers”: “The government of India reserves the right to set so called normative state-wise allocations, So each state will have a certain allocation decided by the Center. Within that allocation, there will be cost sharing, 60-40, unlike now, when the government provides 90% of the funding. If the states want to spend more, they will have to pay 100% now. This is going to destroy the scheme just as much as the switch-off clause, because the poor states, especially, will find it hard to contribute their share. It goes without saying that we will resist this Act tooth and nail.”Shravani Devi, a MGNREGA worker from worker from Rajasthan, echoed Dreze’s determination to resist this attack on the right to work. In a quiet, determined voice, she said, “Modi thinks he can get away with this. The farmers and workers of this country are about to show him he can’t. We have won before. We will win again.”