The sudden dismantling of MGNREGA once again exposes the limits of progressive legislation in the absence of transformation of a casteist, semi-feudal rural society. Over two days in the winter session, the Modi government dismantled one of the most progressive legislations of the UPA regime—the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).
This can be described as yet another nail in the coffin of the supposedly welfare state erected by the Congress-led UPA regimes. One of the principal grounds on which the transformation of MGNREGA into G-RAM-G is being critiqued is that MGNREGA was based on a rights-based architecture, while its new version is a scheme dependent on the largesse of the state. It can be argued that even if a fraction of the vast number of workers who found employment under MGNREGA had been organised, and had come to view the programme as a right rather than a dole from the state, the current government would not have dared to dilute the Act.
This article undertakes a brief review of the implementation experience of the Act, attempts at organising workers, and the necessity of a social transformation that must go hand in hand with progressive legislation. It critiques the liberal propensity to legislate poverty alleviation and rights without any attempt at grassroots transformation of a casteist, semi-feudal social base.
Gradual Weakening of MGNREGA
MGNREGA was a highly progressive and ambitious Act that had the potential to push up wages for a massive rural workforce that survives on the brink of starvation for most parts of the year, while also contributing to broader social change. The Act guaranteed 100 days of employment to any willing rural worker in India, along with compensation for days when work was not provided. Delayed payments were also legally liable for compensation.
The Act did bear out its promise in the initial years. Studies reported that it led to a significant reduction in rural poverty and a rise in wage rates.
However, as with most development schemes in India, once the rural power elite became familiar with the programme, leakages began to emerge. MGNREGA led to a massive inflow of funds at the panchayat level, which in turn gave rise to widespread corruption. Attempts to plug these leakages resulted in a series of technical interventions—so much so that the programme has been described as a “technical laboratory” by Rajendran Narayanan, an academic and activist associated with the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha.
Wage payments were routed through banks and later linked to Aadhaar. Gradually, payments that were initially made at the panchayat level were shifted to the state level and finally to the central level, effectively rendering state governments toothless in implementation.
The Centre for Labour Research and Action, which works with seasonal migrant workers engaged in distress migration and who should have been a natural beneficiary group of MGNREGA, conducted a baseline survey of migrant brick-kiln workers from three districts of western Odisha in 2017. The survey found that out of 560 NREGS job card–holding households, nearly two-thirds (63.4 per cent) did not receive even a single day of work in the previous year, despite a legal guarantee of 150 days of work per annum at the time.
One of the major reasons cited for the unwillingness of job card holders to seek work under NREGS is chronic delays in wage payments and endemic corruption. Wage payments were often delayed by eight to twelve months. LibTech India, which has been tracking NREGA for several years, has consistently documented such delays and large-scale deletions of workers’ names from muster rolls. In its latest report, researchers found that as of September 2025, there had been an 11.7 per cent and 25.6 per cent drop in person-days generated compared to FY 2024–25 and FY 2023–24 respectively. This decline comes on top of a steady fall in person-days over the past few years.
Additionally, the compulsory eKYC facial recognition requirement has further complicated workers’ access to employment, with 46.9 per cent of active workers unable to complete eKYC as of November 2025. While the total number of workers added to the rolls has increased, overall employment under the scheme has declined.
In this context, Rajendran Narayanan speaks of a “discouraged worker effect”. Persistent wage delays, he argues, discourage workers from asserting their rights under the Act. “When the central government acts so rigidly, workers’ trust in the system of unionisation begins to erode,” he notes. He also points to untested and opaque technologies that further confuse workers and restrict access to benefits.
Organising MGNREGA Workers
Many of these leakages could have been curtailed had beneficiaries been effectively organised. While there have been attempts in several states to organise NREGA workers, given the sheer size of the workforce, these efforts have been piecemeal and grossly inadequate. Most initiatives have been driven by civil society organisations and are better described as mobilisation rather than genuine organising.
It is significant that none of the major trade union federations took the initiative to organise NREGA workers on a large scale. In Rajasthan, the Labour Department refused to recognise NREGA workers’ unions, arguing that beneficiaries did not qualify as workers under the Trade Union Act.
Nevertheless, efforts were successful in other states, and NREGA workers’ unions were formed in several regions.
These organisations came together to form the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha (NSM) in 2016. Since then, the Morcha has coordinated struggles to defend the Act, including a 100-day sit-in at Jantar Mantar in 2024.
With the Act now effectively repealed, the NSM is planning a sustained movement. The main opposition party has also promised a nationwide agitation. However, sustained agitation requires a politically conscious, organised, and mobilised mass base.
The Way Forward
Commenting on the essential powerlessness and helplessness of India’s vast underclass, the progressive Hindi poet Dushyant Kumar wrote these famous lines:
"न हो कमीज, तो पैरों से पेट ढक लेंगे
ये लोग कितने मुनासिब हैं, इस सफ़र के लिए"
This translates as:
“If people do not have shirts, they will use their legs to cover their stomachs. How convenient these people are for this journey!”
States that have progressed in independent India—both economically and socially—such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Maharashtra (to some extent), are precisely those that witnessed deep-rooted social transformation at the grassroots level. These transformations were driven primarily by strong anti-Brahminical, anti-caste movements and, in Kerala’s case, a powerful Left movement. This social churning laid the foundation for subsequent economic growth and improved social indicators.
In his final speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, Dr B.R. Ambedkar explicitly warned that political democracy would be hollow without social and economic democracy. The liberal bourgeoisie has attempted to achieve this equality through a series of reformist laws—against child marriage, caste discrimination, and through statutes such as the Right to Education, Right to Food, and Right to Employment.
While such rights-based legislation is necessary, it must be accompanied by the empowerment of people to demand real implementation. One of the most basic tools for such empowerment—mass education—has been systematically neglected. Large sections of the Indian working class remain functionally illiterate. Government schooling systems, where children of the poor study, have collapsed in vast parts of the country, while the better-off send their children to private schools. The Common School System—the only viable means to eliminate this divide—did not even find mention in the Right to Education Act.
This episode once again demonstrates that progressive legislation, in the absence of a sustained social movement that dismantles a regressive social base, cannot travel very far.
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*Centre for Labor Research and Action
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