India, Jan. 2 -- The passage of a resolution in the Punjab assembly opposing the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, along with sustained commentary warning of a "body blow to federalism", has brought India's rural employment framework back into sharp public focus. At a first glance, the objections appear compelling: A rights-based legal guarantee is being altered, states fear erosion of autonomy, and a long-standing welfare architecture is being recast. These concerns deserve careful engagement rather than dismissal. But they also require scrutiny against administrative evidence and lived outcomes. At its core, the controversy is not about whether rural employment should be a legal right - that principle commands broad consensus - but about whether a right that exists largely on paper can be defended indefinitely in the face of weak and uneven delivery. The G-RAM-G debate, therefore, is best understood not as a clash between compassion and efficiency, but as a choice between preserving legal form and improving institutional outcomes. Over the last five years, official dashboards, parliamentary disclosures and audit observations reveal a persistent pattern in Punjab. Despite nearly 12 lakh active job cards, average employment generation has remained between 38 and 42 days per household - far below the statutory 100-day entitlement and consistently below the national average. Fewer than three per cent of rural households in the state have completed the full entitlement in any year. Wage payments have frequently breached the 15-day statutory limit, with delays extending into several weeks, while compensation for delayed payments - though mandated - has rarely been disbursed. These outcomes are not marginal deviations, they are structural. Importantly, they cannot be attributed to a withdrawal of central funding. Allocations were made, but absorption and execution lagged. Audit reports repeatedly flagged under-utilisation of funds, weak project planning and incomplete works. In such circumstances, defending an unchanged legal framework solely on normative grounds risks overlooking the gap between statutory promise and administrative performance. Critics of the G-RAM-G Act argue that the strength of the earlier framework lay precisely in its rights-based design - demand-driven, justiciable and insulated from bureaucratic discretion. The concern is that linking employment to projects introduces uncertainty and centralisation. This apprehension warrants acknowledgment. Yet it also overlooks a critical empirical reality: demand-driven entitlement does not automatically ensure that demand is met. In Punjab, the right existed on paper, but delivery remained partial, episodic and uneven. This distinction is crucial. A paper right derives its authority from statutory language and moral intent; an effective right derives legitimacy from predictable access, timely wages and tangible outcomes. Where these diverge persistently, policy debate must shift from defending design to examining delivery. It is this gap - not ideological hostility to welfare - that the G-RAM-G Act seeks to address. The Act does not reduce the employment ceiling; it expands it from 100 to 125 days. More significantly, it embeds employment within pre-approved, outcome-linked projects aligned with irrigation, housing, water management, renewable energy and climate-resilience missions. The underlying policy logic is that predictable project pipelines, combined with assured convergence of funds, may generate more regular and sustained employment than fragmented task-based works. Much of the federalism critique rests on the fear of centralisation. But cooperative federalism is not merely about preserving formal discretion; it is also about ensuring that decentralised systems function effectively. A framework that leaves planning nominally local but operationally weak can hollow out state autonomy just as surely as excessive central control. By requiring annual project planning at the local level while integrating it with national missions, the new design attempts - imperfectly but deliberately - to recalibrate this balance rather than abolish it. The symbolic controversy surrounding the removal of Gandhi's name from the programme has further intensified opposition. Yet policy coherence demands a separation between symbolism and substance. The ethical benchmark of a welfare programme lies not in nomenclature but in outcomes: the regularity of work, the timeliness of wages and the creation of assets that reduce future vulnerability. Invoking legacy while tolerating chronic under-delivery risks reducing moral inheritance to ritual rather than practice. Concerns have also been raised about the impact on women and marginalised communities. Here again, evidence complicates the narrative. Women's participation in Punjab's rural employment programme has hovered around 30 per cent, well below the national average. Scheduled Caste households are over-represented among job card holders but under-represented in actual work days generated. These patterns suggest that exclusion was not eliminated by a rights-based framework alone. Whether the new system corrects or reproduces these distortions will depend on implementation, but the existing record offers limited grounds for assuming that the status quo was inherently protective. Punjab's unique rural challenges Punjab's rural economy presents distinctive challenges: high agricultural mechanisation, recurrent flooding, groundwater depletion and limited scope for traditional manual works. The floods of 2023 exposed the inadequacy of fragmented rural works and the absence of coordinated rehabilitation mechanisms. A framework that allows labour deployment for canal desilting, embankment strengthening, drainage restoration and climate-resilient infrastructure directly links employment to risk reduction - an outcome that wage support alone cannot achieve. None of this suggests that the G-RAM-G Act is beyond critique. Concerns about administrative capacity, project selection bias and digital exclusion are real and must be addressed through safeguards and oversight. But opposing reform solely on the grounds that it alters a rights-based design risks conflating moral intent with administrative performance. Ultimately, the G-RAM-G debate is not a referendum on the value of legal entitlements. It is a test of whether public policy should privilege statutory form over administrative function when the two diverge sharply. Paper rights matter, but only insofar as they translate into work, wages and resilience on the ground. The challenge before policymakers is not to choose between rights and reform, but to ensure that rights are realised through systems capable of delivering them effectively....