Shillong, Feb 02: The Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee marks twenty years of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) with a sense of deep loss. What was once a legally guaranteed right to work for rural Indians has been dismantled by the BJP-led Union Government and replaced with a discretionary scheme that allows the state to step back when work is unavailable. This is not reform. It is abandonment.
MGNREGA was not a policy on paper. It meant wages during hard times, fewer families forced to migrate, children staying in school, and dignity for women earning close to home. It was built on a simple truth poverty is not a personal failure.
When the market could not provide work, the state accepted responsibility. For nearly two decades, despite flaws and delays, MGNREGA sent a clear message to the citizens: you have the right to ask for work, and the state must respond.
That promise has now been withdrawn. Its replacement, the VB-GRAMG scheme, is capped, centrally controlled, and dependent on approvals and funds. What has been lost is not just a programme, but the assurance that the state will act when people are pushed toward hunger and insecurity.
Those who took the decision to scrap MGNREGA will never stand in ration lines or wait months for unpaid wages. Their children will not be pulled out of school because work has disappeared. The deepest loss here is not income, but dignity.
The Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee strongly condemns the repeal of MGNREGA and demands the immediate restoration of a universal, demand-driven, and legally enforceable right to work. The Congress stands firmly with rural workers, women, Adivasis, Dalits, persons with disabilities, and all those whose lives and dignity depended on this law.
