By Sanjay Das
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 A law that once guaranteed the right to work has now been repealed by the BJP-led Union Government and replaced with a framework that removes that legal guarantee.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.
What MGNREGA Meant for Rural India
MGNREGA did not live mainly in files or speeches. It lived in homes.
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.
Betrayal Requires Clear Language
When harm is caused through law, words matter. What has happened here is not a small change. A right has not been improved—it has been removed. A guarantee has not been refined—it has been dismantled. Protection has not been updated—it has been replaced with permission, dependent on approvals and ceilings. Calling this “reform” empties the word of meaning. Reform strengthens rights. It does not quietly take them away.
Words like “efficiency” and “streamlining” sound harmless, but they hide real consequences. Families do not experience “streamlining”—they experience delayed wages, unpaid work, and empty kitchens.
When language hides harm, it becomes part of the harm. Naming loss clearly is not exaggeration. It is responsibility.
Silence, Comfort, and Distance
Power does not operate alone. It lasts because many people, often without meaning to, allow it to. Not everyone supported rolling back MGNREGA. But many accepted it by staying quiet, by assuming it was unavoidable, or by telling themselves that budgets leave no choice.
How many people accepted the idea that this had to happen without asking who decided it should? How many believed that lack of funds excuses hunger? How many assumed the poor would “manage somehow,” without thinking about what that managing actually means—skipped meals, children leaving school, families forced to leave home?
Cruelty does not always arrive loudly. It often comes calmly, dressed up as discipline and responsibility. It survives because those who are not directly affected feel distant from the pain and mistake that distance for innocence.
Silence becomes habit. Comfort becomes excuse. Distance becomes denial. This is how harm spreads—not only through decisions made at the top, but through quiet acceptance everywhere else.
Constitutional Memory, Ethical Forgetting
India’s Constitution was meant to be lived, not admired from afar. The courts recognised long ago that the right to life includes the right to livelihood, because life without dignity is not life at all.
MGNREGA brought that promise into everyday life. It made clear that rights do not stop at the edge of poverty. Dismantling this guarantee is not continuity—it is forgetting. It is a step away from the hard-won understanding that democracy must protect those who have the least. This is not reform. It is regression.
Power Without Exposure
Those who dismantled this law will never stand in ration lines. They will never choose between migration and hunger. They will never wait months for wages already earned. Their children will not be pulled out of school because work disappeared.
This distance matters. When decisions are made by people who will never live with their consequences, suffering becomes abstract. What looks efficient in offices feels brutal in villages. What is called discipline in policy becomes dispossession in daily life.
The Loss Beneath the Numbers
The greatest loss here is not income. It is dignity. MGNREGA told people: you are allowed to ask. Its removal tells them: qualify, comply, wait, and hope.
When the law stops answering, people stop asking. They stop going to the panchayat. They stop expecting a response. That silence—the moment when citizens no longer believe the state will listen—is the most damaging loss of all.
A Message for the Future
This moment will not disappear quietly. It will be judged—by those suffering now, by those who inherit deeper inequality, and by history itself. Somewhere tonight, a worker will stop waiting for a guarantee that once existed—not because her need has ended, but because hope has. This rollback was not inevitable. Alternatives existed. Choices were made. A society is not measured by how efficiently it manages growth, but by whom it chooses to protect when growth falters.
When the state walked away from those with nothing but their labour, where did you stand—and where will you be remembered as standing?
(The writer is General Secretary, Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee)
