G RAM G: A moral awakening the Cong resists

There is a peculiar irony unfolding before us. At a moment when India is edging towards becoming the world’s third-largest economy, the Congress has chosen to oppose reforms meant to cleanse the rural employment guarantee programme of corruption. One is left wondering whether the party’s discomfort lies not with the changes themselves, but with what those changes threaten to undo.

The protests announced against the Vikasit Bharat Employment Guarantee and Livelihood Mission (VB-G RAM G) from January 10 raise a simple ethical question. Why would any political party object to measures that promise transparency in wage payments, accountability in execution and the creation of durable assets in rural India? The answer, uncomfortable though it may be, seems to lie in the persistence of an older political economy, one that thrived on opacity, intermediaries and plausible deniability.

When the rural employment scheme was conceived two decades ago, India was poorer, more tentative and far less ambitious. Asset creation was incidental, not central. Employment was counted in days, not in outcomes. That context no longer exists. India today is the fourth-largest economy and fast approaching third place. To insist that employment schemes remain frozen in an era of scarcity is to deny the country’s own progress.

Much has been said about the “right to work” being diluted. The facts say otherwise. The guaranteed number of workdays has risen from 100 to 125, and the programme is anchored in parliamentary legislation. If anything, the right has been reinforced, not weakened. What has changed is that the room for manipulation has narrowed.

Experience tells us that under earlier arrangements, especially in Congress-ruled states, the promise of 100 days often translated into barely 50. Machinery replaced labour on the ground, while labour continued to exist on paper. Wages were split between the worker and the network that managed the paperwork. This was not an aberration; it was the system.

The revised framework disrupts this equilibrium. Aadhaar-linked payments, GPS-based monitoring, centralised disbursal and strict timelines have replaced discretion with process. Wages must now be paid within 14 days, or penalties follow. Digital payments, once a minority, now account for virtually the entire system. Corruption does not vanish overnight, but it becomes harder to disguise.

Social audits, long treated as ritualistic exercises, are now recorded as digital evidence and conducted every six months. Grievance redressal has been given legal teeth and deadlines. These are not cosmetic changes; they alter the balance of power between the worker and the system.

The evidence of past abuse is not speculative. In West Bengal, payments were made without work being done, forcing a temporary halt in 19 districts. Similar discrepancies surfaced across 23 states during monitoring in 2025–26. Projects existed in files, not on the ground. Money moved; outcomes did not.

By linking the programme with the Gati Shakti initiative, rural employment is now tied to irrigation, roads, schools and infrastructure that lasts beyond a season. Coordination replaces fragmentation. Maintenance replaces neglect. It is an attempt, finally, to treat rural employment as development rather than as a recurring entitlement to disorder.

One also notices, not without significance, the absence of serious parliamentary engagement from those leading the opposition. Reforms are resisted not through debate, but through boycott and protest. Transparency, it seems, is easier to oppose than to confront.

Global institutions estimate that nearly 25 crore Indians have exited multidimensional poverty in recent years. That achievement, however, does not eliminate the need for rural investment. It sharpens it. What rural India requires now are assets that endure, not employment that exists only to sustain a corrupt ecosystem.

The irony, then, is complete. A party that claims moral ownership of the rural poor appears uneasy with a system that removes discretion, middlemen and opacity. What is being defended is not employment, but a familiarity with disorder. Transparency, after all, has a way of unsettling those who prospered without it.