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In May, the Ministry of Rural Development placed the draft rules under the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Aajeevika Mission (Gramin), or VB-G RAM G, in the public domain for comments, giving citizens and state governments around a month to submit feedback. The rules will determine how India’s new rural employment guarantee framework takes shape, and have significant consequences for workers.

The government has presented VB-G RAM G as an expansion of the rural employment guarantee, mainly because the Act increases guaranteed work from 100 to 125 days. That increase is important. But the real question is whether the new framework preserves the demand-driven and rights-based character of MGNREGA, or risks turning the right to work into a fiscally managed and digitally mediated programme.

Our reading is that the Act introduces several design features that could weaken a worker’s enforceable right to demand work. The draft implementation rules were expected to address these shortcomings, and provide strong safeguards. Instead, they leave several critical questions unanswered.

The most important issue is normative allocation. Under MGNREGA, the principle was that funds should flow to accommodate demand. If workers demanded work, the state was legally required to provide work, and the financing architecture had to respond. Under VB-G RAM G, the Union government will determine state-wise normative allocation every year and expenditure beyond that allocation will have to be borne by the state.

This does not automatically mean that demand will be denied. But it changes the incentive structure. If additional demand means additional state liability, states and local officials may have reason to under-register demand, delay opening works, or avoid triggering unemployment allowance. The guarantee may remain formally intact while access to work is narrowed through budgeting and administration.

The “Objective Parameters for Normative Allocation Rules” make this concern sharper. They say allocation will follow the 16th Finance Commission’s horizontal devolution formula, with additional performance indicators such as timely wage payment, social audit compliance and completion of works. But the rules do not clearly lay out the formula, weights, data sources,........

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