India, Jan. 10 -- The Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rojgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G), Bill 2025, replaces the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 2005. The bill aims to establish a rural development framework aligned with the national vision of Viksit Bharat by 2047 by providing a statutory guarantee of 125 days of wage employment in every financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to undertake unskilled manual work. The aim is to promote empowerment, growth, convergence, and saturation for a prosperous and resilient rural India and enable them to participate more effectively in the expanded livelihood security framework. The bill recognises that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has provided guaranteed wage employment to rural households, ensuring wage income. There were many arguments against MGNREGS, such as why make people work for cash transfers, that it hurt agriculture due to wage increase and curtailed migration that promoted development. It was also argued that the poorer states didn't benefit as much. There were criticisms relating to delayed payments and poor quality of asset creation. There were other operational issues: Unemployment allowance was often not paid and outcomes were poor despite the high cost of running the programme. Some experts maintained that it was wrecking the national labour market. On the other hand, research-based evidence highlighted the programme's social protection for the most vulnerable and the poorest and its demand-based, self-targeting nature. It also set a floor wage, empowered women and panchayats. It was shown to lead to political transformation at the local level due to its rights-based approach. In fact, even the World Bank called it a "stellar example of rural development" as 23% rural households worked in it at least once. A significantly larger chunk of scheduled caste and scheduled tribes (40%) and women (52%, versus the 33% mandate) participated. Indeed, in 20% of the households, only women had worked under the MGNREGS. It was cash transfer, no doubt, but conditional, with bottom-up planning and implementation. It had social audit oversight, complemented private investments, and had multiplier and accelerator impacts on the demand side as most rural citizens are producers and consumers at the same time. Also, it led to some tightening of the labour market that was perceived as much-needed. The Union government will decide the date of roll-out of VB-G RAM G in different states - and also in areas within each state. It will determine state-wise normative allocation for each financial year based on objective parameters as may be specified by it. As a central scheme (as opposed to being a fully centrally-sponsored scheme), it mandates sharing of financial liability between the Union government and the state government in a ratio of 60:40, except for the northeastern and the Himalayan states (where this is 90:10). The new programme takes away the "right" or entitlement of a rural household to have access to the programme anywhere in India as it may not be universally implemented due to specified allocation, choice of area, and the condition of the state's share in it. It intends to facilitate adequate farm labour availability during peak agricultural seasons by mandating state governments to notify in advance a period aggregating to 60 days in a financial year, which covers the peak agricultural seasons of sowing and harvesting, during which works under this scheme will not be undertaken. It is difficult to imagine how 125 days of work per household per year can be achieved in a 10-month period with an estimated resource provision of Rs.1.5 lakh crore (including the state's share) when amounts of the order of Rs.60,000-80,000 crore per annum in the past 20 years - provided almost entirely by the Union government - have led to only about 50 days of work per year against the MGNREGA's promised 100 days. The poverty of planning and class/caste dynamics at the panchayat level - apart from inadequate resource provision - has been a major factor behind the number of workdays available to workers falling short of the guarantee. The stoppage of work for 60 days during the peak agricultural season will hit landless workers hard as MGNREGS had given them some bargaining power against local employers/large landowners, who did not recompense labour at the minimum wage before the Act. In fact, the promise of MGNREGS wage was quite like the promise of Minimum Support Price (MSP) to the farmers. When 86% of India's farmers are small or marginal, and there is a large landless tenant/sharecropper population, it is difficult to justify the provision of stoppage of work for 60 days to facilitate low-cost labour supply to a small segment of medium and large farmers at the cost of landless and marginalised workers. The argument that implementation of MGNREGS during the agriculture season led to shortage of labour and higher wage cost for farmers is not supported by evidence as studies have shown that non-farm wages have also increased. Mapped over the first decade of this century, MGNREGS led to annual real agricultural wage growth rate of just 4.3%. In the earlier phases of the scheme, this growth rate was less than 2.5%. Across its phases, MGNREGS had only a gradual effect on wages across states and districts. Therefore, MGNREGS alone cannot be blamed for the observed farm wage increase. In fact, the share of labour in cost of cultivation was higher by only 10% and 4% in paddy and wheat post-MGNREGS in Telangana and Maharashtra, respectively, compared with the pre-MGNREGS situation. It was only in cotton in Telangana and maize and sorghum in Maharashtra that the cost went up by more than 20% in the post-MGNREGS period. It is important to remember that most of these crops have MSP support, which considers the cost of production, including labour cost, every season, and, therefore, higher labour cost can be compensated through MSP for their produce. To that end, whether the MGNREGS had to be restructured so drastically, instead of being tweaked wherever necessary must be studied closely....