The death certificate of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 2005, was signed without much fanfare in December 2025, replaced by the brand-new Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act (VB-G RAM G), 2025, a title so long it requires its own administrative department to pronounce. For two decades, we operated under the collective delusion that the height of human aspiration for a rural Indian was to spend a hundred days a year under a scorching sun, moving earth from one spot to another. The 2005 Act was born out of a noble impulse to prevent starvation, but it quickly devolved into a state-sponsored ritual of stagnation. We called it a “right-based” revolution, yet for millions, it became a trap—a ceiling that prevented them from ever looking beyond the bottom of a half-dug trench. We have spent billions of rupees over 20 years to ensure that our rural population remains exactly where they are: unskilled, underpaid, and tethered to the whims of a local strongman who decides whose name appears on the muster roll.
When the MGNREGA was first introduced in 2005, it served a vital, albeit grim, purpose. It was the floor that prevented the poorest from falling into the abyss during the lean seasons. It gave women a semblance of financial independence and forced private landlords to pay a slightly less insulting wage. In the early years, you could see the impact in the reduced distress migration and the sense of agency it provided to the landless. It was a social safety net in a country that had none, a temporary bridge designed to carry the vulnerable until the “real” economy could reach them. We measured success in “person-days,” a cold, mechanical metric that prioritised the quantity of sweat over the quality of life. It was the ultimate palliative for a government that couldn’t figure out how to create real jobs, so it decided to manufacture work instead.
However, the dark side of this “guarantee” was a systemic rot that turned a safety net into a communal cesspool of wasted potential. By the mid-2020s, the scheme had become synonymous with “digging holes and filling them back up.” We created thousands of “assets”—unpaved roads that vanished in the first rain, ponds that couldn’t hold water, and plantations that existed only on paper. The irony is that while we were paying people a pittance to perform primitive manual labour, the world around them was undergoing a technological explosion. We made our people “lazy” not because they didn’t want to work, but because we gave them no incentive to learn. Why would a young man in a village spend time learning to repair a solar pump or code a basic app when the government was offering a guaranteed, albeit miserable, wage for moving mud? We effectively subsidised low productivity and institutionalised a lack of ambition, creating a labour scarcity in productive agriculture while our industrial growth choked for want of skilled hands.
Now, as the calendar turns to the final days of 2025, the new VB-G RAM G scheme promises a “modernised” version of this old nightmare. It ups the ante to 125 days and introduces a “60-day agricultural pause” to ensure that farmers aren’t left stranded during harvest seasons. But the most significant shift is the funding: the Centre is now asking states to cough up 40 per cent of the cost, a move that will likely break the back of already bankrupt state treasuries. While the government touts AI-based monitoring and GPS tracking as the cure for corruption, they are missing the fundamental point. Whether you dig a hole for 100 days or 125, and whether a satellite or a corrupt supervisor watches you do it, the result is the same: you are still just digging a hole. The new scheme is merely a rebranding of the same old apathy, shifting the financial burden to the states while maintaining the same archaic obsession with unskilled manual labour as the primary tool for poverty alleviation.
The pitfall of both these schemes—the one we are burying and the one we are birthing—is their refusal to acknowledge that the rural Indian is not a beast of burden. Both frameworks operate on the insulting assumption that “unskilled” is a permanent state of being. We have spent 20 years treating the symptom—hunger—while ignoring the disease: a total lack of marketable skills. We have created a generation that is over-reliant on the state for a subsistence wage but is utterly unemployable in a modern economy. Studies show that while MGNREGA may have increased nominal wages, it had no effect on productivity. It diverted people from learning trades and led them into a dead end of government-mandated busywork. We are effectively paying people to stay poor, ensuring they remain a captive audience for the next election cycle’s promises.
It is high time we stopped this costly charade and scrapped both schemes entirely. The thousands of crores of rupees we pour into these holes every year should be redirected toward a massive, decentralised network of rural skill-building centres. Imagine a village where, instead of a muster roll for digging, there is an enrollment list for training in high-precision welding, drone maintenance for agriculture, food processing, or renewable energy installation. We need to stop paying for sweat and start paying for brains. If we allocated the Rs 95,000 crore earmarked for 2025 to vocational training and small-scale rural industries, we could bridge the gap between Bharat and India. A man with a certificate in plumbing or electrical repair is a productive citizen with a future; a man with a shovel is just a statistic waiting for the next government handout.
The choice is ours: do we continue to manage poverty through these glorified workhouses, or do we finally empower our rural citizens to compete in the 21st century? We are a nation that aspires to become a global superpower, yet our primary strategy for rural development remains rooted in Bronze Age technology. We must stop this fetishisation of manual labour and start investing in the only asset that actually matters: the human mind. Let us bury the shovel along with the legislation of 2005 and 2025, and give our people the tools they need to build a future, not just a ditch.