Appeal to President: Call upon Parliament of India to Repeal VB-GRAMG Act, Restore & Strengthen MGNREGA: Uphold Rights of Millions of Rural Women Workers
napm india
Appeal to President: Call upon Parliament of India to
Repeal VB-GRAMG Act, Restore & Strengthen MGNREGA
19th February, 2026
To,
Hon’ble Droupadi Murmu,
President of India,
Rashtrapati Bhavan,
New Delhi
Sub: Appeal to call upon Parliament of India to Repeal VB-GRAMG Act and Restore, Strengthen MGNREGA in the interests of millions of rural and women workers.
Dear Madam,
We the undersigned are writing on behalf of All India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA), Agrarian Alliance and Workers Forum of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), to express our grave concerns regarding the recent repeal of the two-decades old Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA, 2005) and enactment of the Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act (VB-GRAMG Act, 2025), which was granted Presidential assent about 2 months back.
The VB-GRAMG Act dismantles the hard-won legal right of employment that has supported the livelihoods of millions of rural working poor families, since its inception in 2005. This is bound to have an adverse and disproportionate impact on women from rural marginalized backgrounds, especially adivasi, dalit and bahujan women. Lakhs of workers, especially women workers across India have been protesting against the new Act.
We urge you to kindly call upon Parliament of India to pass a legislation to repeal the VB-GRAMG Act immediately and pending the same, hold back on operationalization of the Act. We also urge you to call upon the Parliament to restore and strengthen MGNREGA, in the interests of millions of rural workers, in particular women workers.
The VB-GRAMG Act is a retreat from India's commitment to social justice, dignity of labour, and democratic accountability that was written into the core of the MGNREGA Act, 2005. The detrimental impacts of the new law are not incidental, but central to the Act, which retreats from even the minimal right to employment and social protection of the working poor. The VB-GRAMG Act was passed without meaningful consultation with workers, gram panchayats, women’s collectives, trade unions, disability rights groups, or social movements that have made MGNREGA work for the marginalized peoples over the past two decades. This absence of democratic process is particularly alarming, given the scale of the programme and the depth of evidence already available on both its achievements and its implementation challenges, over the past two decades. A restructuring of rural employment at this scale, without public deliberation, undermines democratic accountability and constitutional norms of participatory governance.
MGNREGA’s acknowledged gendered impact:
MGNREGA as a large-scale public employment programme saw women’s participation rising steadily over time. This is the result of specific design features like a legally enforceable right rather than discretionary provisioning of work, demand-driven access to work, decentralized decision-making, proximity of worksites to habitation, gender equality in wages for similar work, and provision of child care facilities.
Approximately 70–80% of rural women workers are engaged in agricultural and allied labour, much of it unpaid, underpaid, or informal. In this context, MGNREGA enabled women to combine paid work with care responsibilities, access independent income, and exercise a limited but significant form of economic citizenship. This achievement has been widely documented across states and social groups. The VB-GRAMG Act by replacing the basic feature of MGNREGA 2005 as a justiciable right has dealt a harsh blow to women’s right to paid work.
Crucially, MGNREGA’s character as a justiciable right was the bedrock of the legal guarantee of work, time-bound wage payments, decentralized planning through Gram Sabhas, and the absence of discretionary selection. This core feature of MGNREGA Act as a justiciable right created conditions under which women could demand work without mediation by employers, contractors, or political gatekeepers. These features explain the high proportion of women workers in MGNREGA over two decades. The presence of such a high proportion of women workers in MGNREGA in the context of low women’s labour force participation rate (WLFPR) in India in general is revealing; it is a clear indication that MGNREGA’s architecture and design provided large number of rural women enabling paid work opportunity, within the broader backdrop of agrarian distress.
VB-GRAMG Act’s structural exclusion of women
The VB-GRAMG Act replaces several women-worker friendly features of MGNREGA 2005 and harms women, especially Dalit, Adivasi, disabled, elderly and single women, as well as gender-diverse persons, whose access to paid work is shaped by care burdens, mobility constraints, ill-health, and social location.
Key provisions of the Act having direct gendered consequences:
Ø Centralisation of work allocation and
location: This move forces workers to travel to notified sites, rather than
enabling work close to home. This effectively excludes women responsible for
childcare, eldercare, and domestic labour, reversing gains in labour-force
participation.
Ø Seasonal withdrawal of work during agricultural periods: This denial of alternative work in periods of high labour demand weakens women’s bargaining power in labour markets, and within households pushing them back into unpaid, exploitative labour, and legitimizing the huge gender pay gaps in agricultural labour.
Ø Discretionary provisioning and capped demand erode women’s ability to claim work as a right, rendering them dependent on local gatekeepers and intermediaries.
These exclusions in the VB-GRAMG Act are not incidental casualties. They are the obvious outcome of a deliberate choice in the new VB-GRAMG Act to move away from the rights-based framework of MGNREGA. Under MGNREGA, sustained public mobilization ensured that the Union government could not arbitrarily restrict demand, cap employment, or selectively apply the Act across regions. The introduction of discretionary powers under the VB-GRAMG Act represents a rollback of these hard-won safeguards. For women whose access to paid work is already mediated by caste, patriarchy, and local power structures, this discretion translates directly into exclusion.
The weakening of Panchayats and Gram Sabhas under the proposed framework further intensifies gendered exclusion. Local self-governance institutions which have statutorily mandated women representatives were critical sites where women could collectively articulate work priorities and negotiate access. Centralised, command-driven allocation removes these collective entry points and recentralises power away from women workers.
Technocratic control impacts gendered exclusion
Over the last decade, the increasing reliance on biometric authentication, centralised digital systems, and rigid technological protocols has produced widespread exclusion under MGNREGA. The VB-GRAMG Act deepens this disturbing trajectory. Women, particularly elderly women, women with disabilities, single women, Dalit and Adivasi women, as well as trans persons and those with limited access to technology, are disproportionately affected by biometric failures, poor digital connectivity, and system errors. These exclusions routinely result in denied wages or deletion from records for work that has already been performed.
These technocratic systems have also paradoxically increased corruption by shifting power to intermediaries who control access to enrolment, authentication, and grievance resolution. Women workers, especially those with limited literacy or mobility are compelled to rely on brokers, local officials, or informal agents, eroding the autonomy that MGNREGA was designed to provide.
Such technocratic governance treats the poor as subjects of experimentation rather than rights-holders. As has been widely observed, these systems systematically ignore embodied realities of ageing, disability, care work, and gendered access to technology.
Fiscal restructuring will lead to the erosion of women’s livelihood security
The proposed 60:40 Centre - State funding ratio further undermines women’s access to work. Poorer states with high concentrations of women agricultural workers may be compelled to ration and reduce employment, deepening both regional and gender inequalities.
Union budgetary allocations for MGNREGA have steadily declined in real terms over recent years. Even under the MGNREGA, workers were getting 36-44 days of employment in the last two years and not the guaranteed 100 days of employment. In this context, the promise of 125 days under VB-GRAMG, without assured funding, wage revision, or demand-based access - appears largely illusory.
At the same time, the Act is silent on periodic wage revision, despite stagnant and inadequate wages being among the most pressing concerns for women workers. The promise of expanded workdays is rendered meaningless without livable wages or guaranteed access to employment.
With approximately 26 crore workers currently registered under MGNREGA, these changes represent a nationwide restructuring of rural livelihood security in which women will bear the heaviest costs.
Constitutionally Regressive VB-GRAMG Act Will Cause Gendered Harm
The disproportionate impact on women is not merely a social concern, it is a constitutional one. By shifting employment provision from a justiciable right to a discretionary scheme, the VB-GRAMG Act undermines the constitutional guarantees of equality, dignity of labour, and social justice. For Dalit, Adivasi, and rural women, whose access to land, assets, mobility, and alternative livelihoods is already structurally constrained, this represents a profound rollback of citizenship rights and intensifies rural agrarian and livelihood distress, aggravating gendered impacts and violence.
In light of the above, we respectfully urge you to call upon the Parliament of India to:
1. Pass a legislation repealing the VB-G-RAM-G Act with immediate effect. Pending the passing of such repeal legislation, the operationalization of the VB-G-RAM-G Act must be put on hold.
2. Recognize and undo the gendered and multi-dimensional adverse impacts of the VB-G-RAM-G Act on millions of rural workers, in particular women workers.
3. Initiate a transparent, consultative process to restore and strengthen MGNREGA by increasing budgetary allocations and addressing implementation failures, instead of dismantling it.
For millions of women workers, MGNREGA is not a welfare benefit but a vital guarantee of dignity, autonomy, and survival. Scrapping it constitutes a serious regression in India’s constitutional commitment to gender justice and democratic governance. We hope your high office will intervene appropriately in the interests of rural women across India.
Signed on behalf of All India Feminist Alliance, Agrarian Alliance and Workers’ Forum - NAPM
1. Aarthi Pai, Bangalore
2. Albertina Almeida, Advocate, Goa
3. Arti Zodpe, Activist, Maharashtra
4. Anita Cheria, Bangalore
5. Arundhati Dhuru, UP, NAPM
6. Anuradha, Saheli, Delhi
7. Bhanumathi Kalluri, Social activist, Hyderabad
8. Bittu Karthik, Social activist, Delhi
9. Bhargav Oza, Lawyer, Researcher, Ahmedabad
10. J Devika, feminist historian, Kerala.
11. Gouthami, ALIFA, Goa
12. Gova Rathod, Gujarat
13. Indira Rani, Independent Researcher
14. Kiran Vissa, Rythu Swarajya Vedika
15. Madhu Bhushan, Bangalore, Karnataka
16. Mamata Dash, Activist, New Delhi
17. Medha Patkar, NBA & NAPM
18. Meera Sanghamitra, NAPM
19. Mina Jadhav, Majur Adhikar Manch, Gujarat
20. Neetisha Xalxo, Dhanbad Jharkhand
21. Nikita, Activist, Delhi
22. Nidhi, ALIFA, Rajasthan
23. Puja, ALIFA-Delhi
24. Dr Preeti Edakunny, Bangalore
25. Poushali Basak, Researcher and activist.
26. Radhika Desai, Feminist researcher, Goa
27. Rahee, Social Activist, Maharashtra
28. Renuka, Social Activist, Maharashtra
29. Ritu, Queers for Constitution, Lucknow
30. Ritash, NAPM-ALIFA & JSA
31. Rohit Chauhan, Saurashtra Dalit Sangathan
32. Rukmini Rao, Social Activist, Hyderabad
33. Sagari Ramdas, Food Sovereignty Alliance
34. K. Sajaya, Social activist, Hyderabad
35. Dr. Sanju, ALIFA Rajasthan
36. Soumya Dutta, MAUSAM & NACEJ-NAPM
37. P Shankar, Dalit Bahujan Front, Telangana
38. Adv Dr Shalu Nigam, Delhi NCR
39. Shiva, Researcher, Delhi
40. Svati Shah, Academic
41. Suneetha A, Feminist researcher, Hyderabad
42. Usman Jawed, Workers Forum, NAPM Mumbai
43. Yuvraj Gatkal, Agrarian Forum, NAPM-Pune
All India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA–NAPM)
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