The Lok Sabha has passed the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin): Viksit Bharat – G RAM G Bill 2025. The legislation will replace the twenty-year-old Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005. The Bill seeks to establish a rural development framework aligned with the national vision of Viksit Bharat @2047. Under the legislation, a statutory guarantee of one hundred and twenty-five days of wage employment will be provided in every financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to undertake unskilled manual work.

The fund-sharing pattern between the central government and state governments will be 60:40 for all states other than the North-eastern and the Himalayan states, wherein the sharing arrangement will be 90:10. The state government will continue to pay unemployment allowance and compensation. The bill provides for using biometric authentication for transactions, geospatial technology for planning and monitoring, mobile application-based dashboards for real-time tracking, and weekly public disclosure systems. All works undertaken under this Bill will be aggregated into the Viksit Bharat National Rural Infrastructure Stack, creating a unified national framework for rural public works.

Replying to the discussion on the Bill, Union Rural Development Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said, Rural development is at the core of its policy. He said, Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the MGNREGA scheme has been implemented properly and effectively. He said, Under MGNREGA, the UPA government had spent only two lakh 13 thousand crore rupees, while the Narendra Modi government spent over eight lakh 53 thousand crore rupees. Mr Chouhan highlighted that under the UPA regime, one thousand 660 crore man – days of employment were generated from 2006-07 to 2013-14, while during the NDA government, three thousand 210 crore man-days of employment were created.