What MGNREGA Meant for Rural India
It lived in village kitchens where a few weeks’ wages meant food on the stove. It lived in households where families delayed migration just long enough for a child to finish a school term. It lived in the lives of women who could earn money close to home, whose work was finally recognised by law rather than treated as informal help.
The Act did not promise prosperity. It promised something simpler and more urgent: breathing space. And for the poor, breathing space often means survival. It is the difference between coping and collapse, between staying rooted and being forced to leave, between dignity and despair.
Under MGNREGA, a worker did not beg for employment. She applied for it. She demanded it. She went to the panchayat with her job card and the law on her side. That mattered. It told her that her survival was not a favour—it was a right. It told her, plainly: your life matters enough for the state to respond.
The Moral Vision Behind the Law
MGNREGA began with an uncomfortable but necessary truth: poverty is rarely a personal failure. It is shaped by landlessness, caste and gender exclusion, climate shocks, and an economy that creates wealth for some while leaving others with nothing but uncertain labour. The law refused to pretend otherwise. From this honesty came its moral logic. If the market cannot provide work, the state must step in. If lack of work leads to hunger, the state cannot look away. And if dignity depends on having a livelihood, then livelihood cannot depend on charity—it must be protected as a right.
For nearly two decades, MGNREGA served as a law that held responsibility in place. It was imperfect and often delayed, but its purpose was clear. It told the poorest citizen something the Indian legal system had rarely said before: you are allowed to ask, and the state is required to answer.
The State’s Obligation and Its Withdrawal
When a worker applies for work and is told to come back next month, what she experiences is not a policy debate—it is absence. Democracy is not something she feels in speeches; she feels it in whether the state responds when she needs to survive.
The legitimacy of democratic power rests not only on elections, but on whether the state takes responsibility for those with the least power to protect themselves. A society shows its character not when the economy is growing, but when people are struggling.
MGNREGA recognised this. It treated unemployment as a long-term reality, not a temporary inconvenience. It treated hunger as a public responsibility, not a private shame. By guaranteeing work on demand, it turned concern into duty.
The repeal of MGNREGA and its replacement with a discretionary, capped, centrally controlled framework breaks that duty. What has been withdrawn is not just a programme, but a promise.
There was a time when the state said: if there is no work, we will provide it. A time when it said: hunger is not your fault. A time when it said: dignity does not require permission.
Today, the message is different. Workers are asked to wait. They are told funds have run out. They are expected to adjust, migrate, and endure. And often, the state says nothing at all.
This is not a technical delay. It is the state stepping away from its responsibility. It is not governance under pressure. It is abandonment.
Twenty years ago, India passed a law that did something rare and necessary: it spoke honestly about poverty. It did not describe it as bad luck, laziness, or something people should quietly endure. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) recognised poverty for what it often is—the result of not having work, land, or security in an unequal economy.
MGNREGA was not just another welfare programme. It was a promise by the state that survival would not be left to charity or silence—that if people were willing to work, the state would not turn away.
As someone who has watched this law shape everyday life across rural India—and in Meghalaya in particular—I mark its twentieth anniversary with pride in what it achieved, grief at what has been taken away, and deep concern about what its dismantling tells us about how power is exercised today. A law that once guaranteed the right to work has now been repealed by the BJP-led Union Government and replaced with a framework that removes that legal guarantee.
This is not a routine policy change. It is not a technical adjustment. It is not reform in any meaningful sense. It is a moral decision. At its heart, this is not a debate about budgets or efficiency. It is about right and wrong
.The writer is General Secretary, Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee)
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