The Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government’s decision to revamp India’s signature rural job guarantee scheme is ill-advised, petty, myopic and dubious from an intention point of view. However, what it is above all is emphatically and unequivocally anti-women, perhaps without an overt understanding that it is so.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is now Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) or VB-G RAM G. The unfortunate acronym—the ‘G Ram G’ being a hat tip to the BJP’s Hindutva politics—aside, the revamp of the scheme marks a significant dilution of the scope, intent and spirit of the original version, and consequently, of its effectiveness.

The changes are going to hit hard the rural poor who have depended on and benefited from the welfare programme. But the biggest brunt will be borne by rural women, simply because they have been the single biggest beneficiaries of this scheme.

For a government and a prime minister that claim to have kept nari shakti (women empowerment) at the very centre of their electoral politics and policy-making, this is an inexplicable misstep. And, in fact, is a retrograde and regressive measure with respect to this very important constituency.

MGNREGA vs VB-G RAM G

MGNREGA, brought in by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in 2006, promised 100 days of employment a year, comprising unskilled manual work for each rural household. Essentially, the scheme was a safety net, meant to be a fall-back mechanism in times of distress, and designed in a way to provide jobs in a guaranteed manner as per demand within the stipulations of the Act.

The scheme was primarily funded by the Central government, which meant there was negligible burden on states, and hence, the funding wasn’t really a point of contention. MGNREGA received massive budgetary allocations over the years, often being the single largest social sector spending in the country by a long measure. However, given that the scheme was demand-based and there was a legal stipulation to meet that demand (of up to at least 100 days a year per household), the budgetary allocations were more indicative than absolute.

The programme had often come under heavy criticism for flawed implementation—from poor quality of asset creation to corruption, leakages, ghost beneficiaries and duplication of payment. However, with payments being digitised over the years and bank accounts becoming pervasive, several of these creases were ironed out. The real impact of the scheme was felt during the Covid-19 years, when distress made several in rural areas turn to it, highlighting its effectiveness in providing a safety net in times of need. Over the years, MGNREGA proved to be a solid poverty alleviation measure and helped increase the bargaining power of labour.

Even while increasing the promised days to 125, the new version of the programme is replete with drawbacks. Among the biggest flaws of its revised version is the funding pattern, essentially introducing joint funding between the Centre and the state, leading to a higher financial burden on states. Effectively, this disincentivises states, especially those reeling under fiscal stress, from actively implementing the programme. Equally importantly, the Centre has introduced the additional burden on states at a time when many states find their fiscal space shrinking.

Moreover, the new version effectively crushes the bottom-up, demand-based spirit of the scheme to bring in a top-down, supply-driven model through a ‘normative allocation’ formula. The basic legal provision of the right to employment is now overshadowed by a purely centrally planned scheme, which has decisive budget caps. There are also new provisions for pausing the employment guarantee scheme for 60 days during the peak agricultural season.

These might sound like technicalities, but are in fact sweeping changes that alter the very nature of the welfare initiative and bring it down more than a few notches.

Women: The biggest victims

As MGNREGA suffers in its new skin, the biggest victim will be rural women. The Act promised not only equal pay for men and women, but also mandated that a third of employment be provided to women, and that has proved to be its most effective outreach.

What the scheme did for rural women has been transformative. It gave women much-needed economic independence. Women in rural areas had few employment avenues earlier, being unable to leave their homes to look for work outside their villages. Being fully dependent on the male members of their families for money meant they were treated with no respect or dignity at home.

However, as the scheme brought in a convenient, even if physically tough, job opportunity for rural women, they began to gain financial freedom, thus adding to their dignity and agency at home and in society. Women increasingly began to look towards the scheme for livelihood and financial security. In the financial year 2006-07, for example, women’s participation in MGNREGA was 40 percent. In 2008-09, it went up to 48 percent and by 2013-14, women constituted a majority of the workforce at 53 percent.

In What Women Want, I argue that the scheme played a role not just in the economic empowerment of women, but also in their electoral participation. As more rural women began to work under MGNREGA and gain economic might, they began to assert themselves at home, bolstered by the financial contribution they now made. One of the aspects of this assertion was the exercise of greater political and electoral agency. In the years after MGNREGA’s launch, women began to exercise their right to vote with greater gusto. The gender gap in voting dropped dramatically from 8.36 percentage points in 2004 (the election immediately before the scheme’s introduction) to 4.42 in 2009 (the general election after)—the lowest ever till then (barring an aberration a year earlier).

Given MGNREGA’s massive impact on the upliftment of rural women, any dilution in its spirit is bound to affect its biggest gainers the most—women. This flies in the face of the Modi government’s claims of being a pro-woman dispensation. Indeed, the prime minister has brought to the forefront of national politics the idea of the unique woman vote, and has been instrumental in giving centre-stage to women-centric issues that so far had either been brushed under the carpet or simply inadvertently ignored—from household toilets to clean cooking fuel and the right of the girl child to live and prosper. However, in trying to score political points by giving a makeover to a previous regime’s marquee scheme and attempting to make it its own, the Modi government has damaged its biggest contribution so far—making ‘nari’ the fulcrum of national politics, elections and welfarism.