Saturday, March 07
The Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Employment & Livelihood (Rural) Act, 2025,
anchored in the Prime Minister’s long-term vision for a Viksit Bharat,
marks not a cosmetic reform but a structural reset of India’s rural
employment paradigm.
For the first time, employment guarantee is being legally fused with
asset durability, technology-backed accountability, and time-bound wage
security—directly confronting the systemic weaknesses that reduced
earlier frameworks to fiscal expenditure with limited developmental
return.
In Uttar Pradesh, the country’s largest rural workforce becomes the
national proving ground of this reform. The state’s scale converts policy
intent into a stress test of governance: if biometric attendance,
geo-tagging, satellite verification, and weekly DBT-linked wages can
function transparently here, the model moves from theory to replicable
national architecture.
The emphasis on permanent assets—water conservation, rural roads,
drainage, markets, flood control, and livelihood-linked infrastructure—
signals a decisive break from the era of temporary works that often
masked inefficiency and leakage as employment.
NATIONAL INFLECTION POINTS
* Employment guarantee expanded to 125 days, with weekly payments
* Legal right to unemployment allowance if work is not provided
* Statutory backing to biometric attendance, geo-tagging, satellite imagery
* Real-time digital monitoring and direct benefit transfer (DBT)
* Mandatory social audits, district ombudsman, time-bound grievance redressal
* Demand-driven framework with a 60:40 Centre–State funding partnership
Critically, technology under this Act is not an administrative accessory
but a legal instrument. This collapses the space for fake beneficiaries,
delayed wages, unverifiable assets, and discretionary opacity.
The implication is unmistakable: past failures were not technical.
They were institutional and political.
With the potential to unlock nearly ₹17,000 crore in additional effective
rural resources, the Act repositions employment from a relief mechanism
to productive state capacity at the village level—linking labour dignity,
fiscal discipline, and development outcomes.
If implemented with integrity and continuity, the Viksit Bharat G Ram G
Act may be remembered less as a welfare reform and more as a governance
correction—aligning villages, states, and the nation into a single
accountable development framework.
STRONG VILLAGES DO NOT MERELY SUPPORT THE NATION.
THEY DEFINE ITS RESILIENCE.
By-
Sapna Singh
National Bureau
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