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‘Saddest day for the country’: Congress slams Centre as VB-G RAM G wage rates get notified

With the wage rates under the VB-G RAM G getting notified on Tuesday, the Congress hit out at the Centre, saying the Act effectively repealed the MGNREGA by replacing a demand-driven legal entitlement with a centrally controlled, allocation-based programme. Addressing a press conference at the Congress office in New Delhi, Lok Sabha MP and Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, Saptagiri Ulaka, said the new framework dismantles the statutory guarantee of work available to rural households and weakens workers’ rights by making employment contingent on pre-approved budgetary allocations rather than actual demand. “Today is the saddest day for the country,” he said. Ulaka, an MP from Koraput in Odisha, said that under MGNREGA, any registered rural household could demand work, and the administration was legally obligated to provide employment within the stipulated time or pay an unemployment allowance. Funding, he said, followed certified demand, making the scheme rights-based. He said the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G) Act, 2025, fundamentally changes this framework by shifting to a supply-based model in which employment depends on advance budget allocations, approved labour budgets, centrally determined ceilings, state contributions and administrative capacity. He also criticised the proposed funding pattern under VB-G RAM G as part of which, in most cases, Centre’s share has been reduced to 60% while states would now have to contribute 40% of programme expenditure. He demanded withdrawal of the proposed funding structure under VB -G RAM G, restoration of the Centre’s responsibility for guaranteeing employment, protection of job cards from arbitrary deletion, and removal of administrative barriers to employment. Congress’s communications in charge Jairam Ramesh, meanwhile, said that “the injustice of the Modi government’s new law aside, the wages due to workers are also unjustifiably low – largely at Rs 300 per day”. The Rajya Sabha MP said, “In the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign, the Congress, as part of its Shramik Nyay campaign, had guaranteed a Rs 400 national daily minimum wage to all workers – including for MGNREGA. The expert committee headed by Dr Anoop Satpathy, set up by the Modi government, had also recommended a national minimum wage floor at Rs 375 per day, back in 2019.” “Given the widespread minimum wage protests in industrial hubs like Noida, and at a time when the stagnation of rural wages is widely recognised as a key constraint on our economic growth, this notification is both a snub to India’s workers and an unwise economic policy,” added Ramesh in a statement.