Viksit Bharat Rozgar Mission Act: Why Claims of Dilution Miss the Point

The President’s assent to the “Viksit Bharat — Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025” marks a significant shift in India’s rural employment architecture. By expanding the statutory employment guarantee to 125 days and embedding livelihood security within a broader framework of asset creation and productivity, the law has triggered a political and policy debate. Critics argue that decentralisation and demand-based rights have been weakened and that fiscal retreat is being masked as reform. A closer reading of the Act, however, suggests that many of these claims rest on a fundamental misinterpretation of both its design and intent.

What the New Law Actually Changes

At its core, the Act retains the justiciable right to wage employment while expanding entitlements. The guaranteed days of work rise from 100 to 125, and long-standing procedural barriers that often nullified unemployment allowance in practice have been removed. Time-bound grievance redress mechanisms have been reinforced, addressing a gap that implementation experience had repeatedly exposed — the distance between statutory promise and lived reality.

Rather than weakening enforceability, the law attempts to make the guarantee more real on the ground by ensuring that administrative lapses no longer become a basis for denying workers their rights.

Why the ‘Welfare versus Development’ Framing Falls Short

Much of the criticism flows from an old conceptual binary — that welfare and development are competing choices. The new framework explicitly rejects this. Wage employment, durable asset creation, agricultural stability and long-term productivity are treated as a continuum. The idea is not merely to provide income support during distress, but to link that support with infrastructure that strengthens rural resilience over time.

This approach reflects lessons from years of episodic employment, where work availability fluctuated sharply and assets were often fragmented or short-lived.

Does Planning Undermine Demand-Based Employment?

The charge that demand-driven employment has been replaced by top-down planning rests on a false opposition. Demand for work continues to originate with workers. What changes is timing and preparedness. By anchoring execution in advance, participatory village-level planning, the Act ensures that when workers seek employment, works are already available rather than delayed by administrative unpreparedness.

Planning here does not suppress demand; it operationalises it. It shifts the system from reactive crisis response to anticipatory readiness.

Decentralisation Recast, Not Reversed

Claims of centralisation overlook the institutional architecture of the law. Gram panchayats remain the primary planning and implementing authorities, with gram sabhas retaining approval powers. What has changed is that decentralised planning is no longer episodic. Viksit Gram Panchayat Plans are aggregated upward — at block, district, State and national levels — to enable coordination and convergence across sectors.

Decision-making authority remains local; what is centralised is coherence and visibility. This addresses long-standing fragmentation without eroding decentralised control.

Consultation, Federalism and Fiscal Design

The assertion that the reform was pushed through without consultation does not align with the record. The Bill followed extensive engagement with States, technical workshops and multi-stakeholder discussions, with several design features shaped by State feedback and implementation experience.

On finances, the reform is also misread as withdrawal. The Centre’s share rises to nearly ₹95,000 crore, up from ₹86,000 crore earlier. The 60:40 funding model mirrors the structure of centrally sponsored schemes, with a 90:10 ratio for northeastern and Himalayan States and Jammu and Kashmir. Rule-based normative allocation and contextual flexibility — including relaxations during natural disasters — are balanced within a cooperative federal framework.

What Past Experience Revealed

Implementation data over the last decade points to sustained expansion rather than neglect: higher allocations, increased person-days, greater women’s participation, and improved payment systems. At the same time, experience also revealed structural weaknesses in the earlier framework — weak enforceability of unemployment allowance, fragmented asset creation and vulnerability to duplication and leakages.

The new Act seeks to correct these design flaws rather than freeze a framework that often under-delivered during droughts, migration spikes and crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why the Debate Matters

Framing the reform as a rollback obscures the real policy choice: whether to preserve an employment guarantee that struggled to translate law into outcomes, or to renew it through stronger enforceability, advance planning and integration with rural development goals. By expanding statutory entitlements while embedding them in a productivity-oriented framework, the Act attempts to align welfare with development rather than treat them as opposing ends.