ILS STATEMENT AGAINST THE PASSING OF “VB- G RAM G” - AN ANTI-LABOUR BILL PASSED IN india

ILS STATEMENT AGAINST THE PASSING OF “VB- G RAM G” - AN ANTI-LABOUR BILL PASSED IN INDIA

Jan 2025

The new VB- G RAM G bill replacing MNREGA, weakens the legal right to work, a social security lifeline to millions of manual labourers, by turning it into a centrally controlled scheme with fixed budgets instead of guaranteed employment. The Act was brought before Parliament and rushed through without meaningful debates or discussions with labour unions, worker’s organisations or state governments whose members are directly affected by it. 

• NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, a wide coalition of organisations working with MGNREGA workers, repeatedly stated that the draft was prepared and introduced without any stakeholder engagement or public discussion, violating established norms of pre-legislative consultation.

• Under the original Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), rural households had a statutory, demand-driven right to up to 100 days of unskilled wage work, and the Central Government fully funded those wages. If workers sought employment, the law obliged the State to provide it, a legal right backed by enforceable provisions and unemployment allowances when work couldn’t be supplied.

• In the backdrop of the new labour codes 2025, officially brought into effect from November, have been framed as “simplifying compliance with workers”, “modernising business” and “enhancing workers’ rights”. The critics argue that the implementation of these labour codes dismantle decades of legally established worker’s rights while expanding employers’ power. It raises the threshold for requiring government permission for layoffs and retrenchment, enabling firms to hire and fire with far less oversight. They also weaken collective power by making harsher conditions for workers to organise and defend their interests. What is being sold as “simplification” or “modernisation”, is in fact a shift of power to employers and increasing risk for workers.

• The new VB- G RAM G Bill repeals a rights-based Act and replaces it with a supply-driven, centrally controlled scheme. Instead of work being available whenever a worker demands it, the Centre now decides “normative allocations” fixed budget ceilings for each state and employment opportunities depend on these allocations. Once funds run out, the legal guarantee effectively ends. This can play out in ways where funds can be squeezed for opposition-ruled states as the Centre picks and chooses where work is allowed, and the states will be pushed to carry a much heavier financial burden. Such conditions completely demolish the idea of rural employment guarantee.

• The mandatory Aadhaar e-KYC process, imposed upon the Indian rural workforce with an impossible deadline in November 2025, led to the deletion of lakhs of MGNREGA workers from record, effectively denying them access to wage work through digital exclusion rather than choice. The recent digitisation has already locked out around 2.7 million workers, prospectively further marginalising rural women as they are less likely to own phones, control devices or have independent access to digital infrastructure. Digitisation has been proving excessively exclusionary in rural India, where access to smartphones, stable internet, and digital literacy is uneven in many cases.

• Instead of using technology to bridge structural gaps, the government is deploying it as a tool of control and silencing. Technology thus evades democratic accountability. When wages are denied or job cards deleted, there is no official “decision” to challenge, rather just a technical failure. In this way, digitisation suppresses dissent by individualising hardship, erasing collective bargaining and muting workers’ voice under the guise of modern governance.
  
  

• Delhi Police has denied NREGA Sangharsh Morcha from protesting against this anti-worker bill citing legal requirement that a protest needs to be registered 10 days prior to the day of protest. This is deeply ironic given the reality that decades of workers’ rights were undone in just 2 days.

In summary, we at ILS believe that the recent Act passed by the Indian central government seeks to structurally weaken India’s rural labour force by dismantling rights and shifting power away from workers and local communities. We stand in full solidarity with the protests and strikes demanding real worker justice.