When the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was enacted in 2005, it marked a historic moment in India’s development journey. For the first time, wage employment in rural areas was recognised as a legal entitlement. Over the next two decades, the programme became a lifeline for millions of rural households—particularly women—during periods of agrarian distress, economic slowdown, and most recently, the COVID-19 crisis.
With the enactment of the Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025, the employment guarantee framework has entered a new phase. The most visible change is the extension of guaranteed employment from 100 to 125 days. Employment rights have clearly been retained, and this continuity is important. At the same time, the revision offered an opportunity to respond more deeply to the many lessons that emerged from over twenty years of implementation on the ground.
The 2005 Act was rooted in a rights-based political commitment—responding to rural distress, unemployment, and exclusion. Its objectives were clearly defined: providing guaranteed employment on demand, strengthening the livelihood base of the rural poor, and ensuring social inclusion through local governance institutions. The 2025 Act, while retaining this framework, is shaped by a different context. It is embedded in the larger national vision of Viksit Bharat @2047, with an emphasis on empowerment, convergence, saturation, and the creation of rural infrastructure that can reduce the long-standing gap between rural and urban facilities.
This shift is understandable and, in many ways, necessary. India today needs durable rural infrastructure—water systems, institutional facilities, livelihood-supporting assets—that can create the conditions for sustained employment and enterprise. The revised Act acknowledges this by encouraging Gram Panchayats to prepare Viksit Gram Panchayat Plans on a saturation basis, drawing on the recommendations of Gram Sabhas and Ward Sabhas.
If used meaningfully, this planning mandate can be transformative. It allows villages to move away from piecemeal works towards comprehensive development planning—integrating natural resource management, social infrastructure, and livelihood-related assets. Yet, the real potential of this shift depends on how strongly gender-responsive planning is embedded in local decision-making—an area where policy attention has historically remained limited.
Women have always been central to the employment guarantee programme. For more than a decade, they have constituted around half of all workers under MGNREGS. Many are young rural women in their productive and reproductive years—capable, energetic, and keen to contribute economically to their families. However, this is also the stage of life when women carry the heaviest burden of unpaid care work, particularly the responsibility of caring for young children.
The challenges they face are not about motivation or willingness to work. They arise from a mismatch between standard worksite norms and women’s everyday realities. Fixed work hours, physically demanding tasks, distant worksites, and inadequate childcare support often make participation difficult, even when legal entitlements exist.
The 2025 Act reiterates that priority should be given to women so that at least one-third of beneficiaries are women, and that efforts should be made to include single women and persons with disabilities. While this reflects continuity with the earlier Act, it does not fully reflect today’s reality. When women already make up half the workforce, the question is no longer about minimum inclusion, but about how to enable those women who are most constrained by pregnancy, lactation, and childcare responsibilities.
This is where gender-responsive planning at the Gram Panchayat level becomes crucial. While maintaining labour–material ratios at the district level is important for financial discipline, Panchayats should have flexibility to choose works that are less labour-intensive and involve higher material components if these are more suitable for women with care responsibilities. Infrastructure-heavy works, when thoughtfully selected, can actually enable women’s participation rather than exclude them.
The integration of piped water supply planning under the Jal Jeevan Mission within village development plans illustrates this well. Drinking water at the household level has far-reaching benefits for rural women—reducing physical drudgery, eliminating social discrimination at public water points, enhancing dignity, and saving time that can be invested in paid work, enterprises, or community life. Few public investments have such a direct and lasting gender impact.
Institutional arrangements matter as well, not only in terms of leadership but also in how information shapes planning and accountability. One of the persistent limitations of MGNREGS over the years has been that its digital dashboard, while strong on aggregate monitoring, was unable to capture age-disaggregated data of women workers. As a result, women were treated as a homogenous category, and nuanced planning or monitoring for women at different life stages—particularly those in reproductive age, pregnant or lactating women, and those caring for young children—remained largely invisible. What was not captured in data also remained out of policy sight.
Going forward, there is a strong case for integrating data systems across programmes that work with the same constituencies. Linking employment guarantee data with those of national women and childcare programmes and the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) can enable more comprehensive, life-cycle–sensitive planning. Such integration would help local governments design works, care support, and livelihood pathways that respond to women’s real constraints and aspirations, rather than relying solely on aggregate participation numbers.
The care economy remains the most under-addressed dimension of employment planning. Crèches, equal wages, and reservations of workdays are necessary but not sufficient. Encouragingly, India already has policy experience that could be adapted here. Cash transfer schemes such as the Ladli Behna Yojana in Madhya Pradesh, and similar initiatives in other states, have demonstrated how direct support to women can enhance agency and choice. A modest top-up to wages for women workers with young children could allow them to hire trusted childcare support—whether from within the family, neighbourhood, or Self-Help Groups—making participation feasible without compromising child safety.
Strong convergence with programmes like NRLM, which has built extensive women’s networks over the years, can further support these arrangements and help women transition from wage employment to farm and off-farm livelihoods.
Equally important is preserving the soul of decentralised planning in the journey towards Viksit Bharat. Bottom-up planning cannot stop at the Gram Panchayat level alone. Block-level planning is essential—whether for building a network of services across villages or for landscape-based approaches to natural resource management that go beyond administrative boundaries. This requires a clearer and more deliberate differentiation of roles across tiers of Panchayati Raj Institutions, so that each tier complements rather than overlaps with the other. What is needed is a departure from the practice of simple aggregation of Gram Panchayat Plans with stapled block and district plans. Instead, genuinely integrated block and district development plans must emerge, adding strategic value to local priorities. Thoughtful use of technology—GIS platforms, data integration, and decision-support tools—can provide an enabling framework that states can explore for more coherent planning.
Finally, the spirit of Viksit Bharat must remain rooted in the empowerment of local institutions and communities. This will require not only digital tools and administrative efficiency, but also high-quality, committed facilitators who can help communities—especially women and marginalised groups—articulate their needs and aspirations. Excessive centralisation may improve efficiency, but it risks losing relevance in diverse local contexts.
The VB-G RAM G Act represents renewed policy attention to rural employment at a critical moment in India’s development trajectory. As state governments frame the rules and guidelines, there is a valuable opportunity to adapt the programme to regional realities, address long-standing challenges faced by working women, and make the most of this reinforced commitment to employment guarantees.
If this opportunity is used well, rural employment can evolve from a safety net into a foundation for inclusive growth—one that recognises rural women not just as workers, but as central contributors to India’s journey towards Viksit Bharat.