Open letter to reverse the repeal of MGNREGA: Consider for endorsement
Aaditeshwar Seth
Hi all, We have 200+ signatures from a range of people with a close understanding of MGNREGA. We will close at 10am on Dec 26th. Please do share in your circles.
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An Open Letter by scientists, academics, civil society organizations, and field functionaries to the Government of India to Undertake Ground Research and Consultations to Fix Issues with the Implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) Rather Than Repeal it.
Dec 23, 2025
We want to highlight several gaps in the reasoning provided to repeal MGNREGA and replace it with the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) VB – G RAM G Bill (2025). We find the discovery of problems with MGNREGA that may have prompted the new Bill to be incomplete and argue that more grounded problem analysis will lead to solutions that will continue to empower communities in a rights-based and inclusive manner as has been the spirit of MGNREGA all along.
The Bill and associated publications like the Backgrounder notes highlight the following issues with MGNREGA and provide mechanisms for improvement through the new Bill:
Demand-driven operation
Stated problem: The open-ended demand-driven design of MGNREGA no longer aligns with contemporary rural realities as livelihoods have become more diverse and digitally integrated.
Solution given: The Bill aims to use a normative approach where geospatial technology and AI-based mechanisms will be used to determine where, how much, and for what to allocate funds.
Reality: The open-ended mechanism of MGNREGA provides crucial context sensitivity. Geospatial technologies and AI-based mechanisms of today cannot, and perhaps never will, capture the full complexity of social–ecological systems. These systems are shaped not only by physical landscapes, but by seasonal labour practices, customary and informal rights, local histories of degradation and repair, community priorities, and negotiated trade-offs that are often invisible to remote sensing and algorithmic inference. Communities possess situated knowledge of these dynamics that cannot be fully codified into datasets or models. While data-driven digital systems can provide valuable decision support, they remain informationally incomplete and must be augmented by local knowledge and community volition. Centralised, normative allocation mechanisms that rely primarily on such systems risk operating with incomplete information, leading to inefficiencies, misallocation, and inequitable outcomes.
Reality: The demand-driven nature of MGNREGA is a revolutionary construct that arises from its rights-based employment guarantee mandate. It provides a crucial space for local democracy to operate – for the poor to demand their rights, for the marginalized to demand to be visible, for the minority to be heard. A normative design erodes such spaces from where democracy is born ground-up and places the burden of proof on the poor to come up with an alternative allocation rather than start by listening to them from the outset. Innumerable studies show how MGNREGA has in fact provided the foundation for the poor to demand social accountability from the administration, equity from the local elite, and mutual respect and consensus from the community. This will get lost with a normative design.
Correct approach: The open-ended demand-driven nature of MGNREGA must be preserved, and to the extent technological approaches may help, communities should be empowered with appropriately designed data-driven digital tools to understand their landscapes better, build sustainable social-ecological plans, and put up their allocation requirements. Force-fitting technology to solve ill-discovered problems must be avoided.
Misappropriation of resources
Stated problem: There is significant misappropriation of resources such as work not found on the ground, expenditure not matching physical progress, use of machines in labour-intensive works, and frequent bypassing of digital attendance systems.
Solution given: The Bill aims to add on to existing mechanisms like the NMMS app and geotagging of structures with biometric-based authentication of workers, field functionaries, and transactions, and weekly public disclosure of key metrics, muster rolls, payments, sanctions, inspections, and grievances.
Reality: While leakages and misuse must be addressed, treating misappropriation primarily as a monitoring or authentication failure misreads the underlying causes. The fact is that misappropriation arises in scenarios where the communities in need of meaningful work and assets are unable to engage effectively with MGNREGA. A few such examples are below of underlying reasons because of which participation is limited, leading to misuse by vested interests.
Communities in need of livelihood and resilience assets often do not understand the complex guidelines they need to follow to demand funds for such assets, and are unable to follow through with placing their demands in the Gram Sabhas and thereon.
Material payments to vendors are not streamlined, which requires communities to have access to enough capital upfront to cover a bulk of payments themselves, leading to the most marginalized not being able to participate easily in MGNREGA.
Low wage rates and delayed payments discourage workers from participating. In fact, the imposition of digital tools like the attendance application has already been disruptive and has impacted women participation most significantly by removing the flexibility that women require to be able to handle multiple chores from household to farm work to income generation activities like MGNGREA.
Wherever adequate support has been provided to marginalized communities to communicate and register their needs, facilitate timely payments and implementation, and audit the implementation themselves, MGNREGA has in fact been nothing short of transformative and leakages are rare.
Correct approach: Mechanisms should be built to facilitate and improve participation from especially marginalized groups and expand access to the radical transparency that is already a key feature of MGNREGA, so that they can counter local power elite and lower bureaucratic corruption, leading to MGNREGA being used to create durable and meaningful rural assets rather than leading to ghost works or wasted resources. Introducing digital technology and putting rigid processes in place to reduce leakages is neither an effective solution nor does it address the underlying causes - empowering communities who require MGNREGA to be able to avail its benefits is the right approach to have MGNREGA live up to its potential of addressing rural resilience and equity.
Labour availability
Stated problem: MGNREGA leads to a lack of labour availability during peak seasons of sowing and harvesting.
Solution given: The Bill allows setting aside 60 days in a year when employment will not be provided.
Reality: The assumption that MGNREGA competes with agriculture for labour does not hold under current rural labour market conditions. MGNREGA wage rates are significantly lower than prevailing agricultural wages, often by as much as 40–50 percent. Rational workers do not substitute higher-paying farm work for lower-paid MGNREGA employment during peak seasons. In practice, MGNREGA functions as a fallback, not a primary employment option - used when farm work is unavailable, uncertain, or exploitative. Seasonal agricultural labour shortages are more credibly explained by structural factors including urban migration and increasing casualisation of farm work. MGNREGA is in fact most effective for households when it helps them create assets that they need anyway, and the wage rates for them become practically inconsequential since the long-term value of the asset is way more important than the immediate MGNREGA wages.
Correct approach: MGNREGA can be a fulcrum to create rural livelihoods by going beyond just unskilled labour work to skilled labour like community-based monitoring of natural resources such as water bodies and forests, data collection about water quality, efficient and equitable water distribution from irrigation systems, and so on. This will directly benefit agriculture as well as reverse rural-to-urban migration by providing good employment opportunities to youth in rural areas themselves, and empower rural communities to manage their landscapes on their own terms.
Some features in the new Bill such as increasing the maximum workdays to 125 per year, greater allocation for administrative support and skilling, and if done right, even the use of digital tools to strengthen transparency, improve participation, and facilitate grievance redressal, are welcome changes. However, the Bill is premised on a misreading of many problems and resorts to solutions that will undo two decades of radical empowerment that MGNREGA has brought about. Research and consultations with civil society organizations and groups who have been working with MGNREGA all this while should be undertaken at the earliest to build a ground-up understanding of where, when, why MGNREGA works, and to find ways to create such environments everywhere.
Please fill this form to endorse the letter: https://forms.gle/3xsrenxcwRAmLeVq8