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On December 19, 2025, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government repealed India’s landmark employment-guarantee legislation, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), using its legislative majority in Parliament despite widespread protests. This moment stands in stark contrast to events two decades earlier, when BJP leaders – then in Opposition and colleagues of those in power today – had joined the United Progressive Alliance government, built a rare parliamentary consensus and enacted MGNREGA, recognising citizens’ right to work.

After coming to power, the BJP government has steadily undermined the work guarantee by weakening its demand-driven character and starving the programme of resources, with the exception of the COVID-19 pandemic period. In a speech in Parliament in 2015, the prime minister said he would nurture MGNREGA as a “monument to failure” – a formulation that captured the government’s approach to the programme.

While MGNREGA remained in force, the government’s intentions could be most clearly gauged in two ways: first, in the financial allocations it made to meet the work guarantee mandated by law; and second, in its response to any increase in demand for work through additional resources.

But now, with the repeal of MGNREGA, the Union government has replaced these obligations with a new financial arrangement under the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, or VB-G RAM G, that is constitutionally and practically untenable. In the name of an employment guarantee, it offers an illusory assurance of enhanced work – up to 125 days – without the legal and fiscal foundations that underpinned the right to work since two decades.

This time, however, the task of persuasion is far more difficult, because the repeal of MGNREGA entails the withdrawal of a concrete set of enforceable rights. Assertions of enhanced employment guarantees under VB-G RAM G have met with resistance, and protests against the repeal of MGNREGA are already emerging across the country. The forthcoming Union Budget will therefore be a critical test of how the BJP government seeks to reconcile the promise of more guaranteed workdays with the lived reality of growing precarity and distress.

Also read: The Modi Government’s Narrative Building on Jobs Is Just Not Succeeding

Put simply, there can be no guarantee under VB-G RAM G........

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