The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA or NREGA), which we have created a large research database and world map entry for, was repealed and replaced at the end of 2025. Millions of rural households and their communities depend upon the income from and the infrastructure created by NREGA projects. This program is a model for Job Guarantee proposals around the world because it is demand driven, federally funded and locally administered, and has been thoroughly documented and studied by academics.
As Khush Vachhrajani wrote for the Daily Wire in January 2026 in a piece entitled “How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More Than It Hides“, the architecture of NREGA’s Replacement, the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G), is fundamentally different than NREGA.
“It has been difficult to fathom why a government would decide to kill a golden goose that has been a crucial lifeline for nearly 26.5 crore workers and 15.5 crore rural households. In many ways, watching Parliament go through the motions of democratic dialogue while repealing the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was shocking.
Photo from the campaign days of Rozgaar Guarantee Abhiyan that began from Rajasthan in late 1990s. Photo: Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan
In hindsight, however, it also revealed the determination of a government to take unilateral decisions regardless of their consequences on large numbers of vulnerable people. The details of the new law – Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G) – have also revealed what kind of economy is being built, whose lives are meant to be stabilised, and whose precarity is being treated as acceptable collateral damage.”