The Politics Behind VB G-RAM-G Bill Why tighter controls threaten local political machines across opposition states.
Job cards have become instruments of local power. The drama in Parliament isn’t about workers—it’s about middlemen losing their cut. When West Bengal’s chief minister dramatically ripped up her copy of the VB-GRAMG Bill, she claimed to defend rural workers. The bill she destroyed offers 125 days of guaranteed work—25 more than MGNREGA ever promised. Mallikarjun Kharge called the reform “systematic murder.” The Communist Party demanded withdrawal. But here’s the thing: none of them addressed the numbers that make this fight necessary. Let’s talk about what MGNREGA actually delivers. A University of California, San Diego study found 41% of officially listed households in Bihar had never worked—ghost beneficiaries on paper, collecting wages that went elsewhere. The CAG’s 2013 audit documented 4.33 lakh job cards with missing photographs, enabling systematic impersonation. The programme spends roughly five rupees for every one rupee that reaches the poor. The government’s own data from 2024-25 shows ₹193.67 crore in documented misappropriation. Monitoring across 23 states found works “not found or not commensurate with expenditure.” Meanwhile, ₹12,219 crore in wages sits unpaid—money owed to workers but stuck in a system that can’t even guarantee timely payment. Now watch what the VB-GRAMG Bill actually mandates: biometric authentication for every transaction, GPS and satellite monitoring of work sites, AI-enabled fraud detection, and weekly public disclosures. The opposition calls this “surveillance.” A more accurate description is that ghost workers become harder to maintain, fictitious work sites harder to claim, and embezzlement harder to hide. Consider West Bengal’s position. The TMC claims ₹51,627 crore in unpaid dues from the Centre. That’s not just an accounting dispute—it’s a number that reveals the scale of claims being made. States with endemic implementation problems could attract more central funds precisely because the Centre bore 100% of wage costs. The worse your administration, the more money you could demand. The 60:40 funding split changes this calculus entirely. When states must fund 40% of programme costs, their bureaucracies suddenly have reason to ensure expenditure is genuine. Gram panchayats that allocated work to political supporters now face biometric verification. Middlemen who extracted their cut from every transaction now face real-time GPS tracking. This is why the rhetoric focuses on “federalism” and “rights” rather than implementation. The substantive ground is unfavourable. India’s Direct Benefit Transfer architecture has already proven what’s possible—cumulative savings of ₹3.48 lakh crore since 2009, with 9.2 crore fake or duplicate beneficiaries eliminated from government rolls. The Welfare Efficiency Index improved from 0.32 in 2014 to 0.91 in 2023. The opposition’s framing assumes MGNREGA as implemented deserves protection. But only 7.61% of enrolled households actually complete 100 workdays. The average hovers around 50-60 days. The legally guaranteed entitlement is, for most participants, a theoretical construct while administrative costs and leakages impose real economic costs. The VB-GRAMG Bill is imperfect. Its normative allocation system needs careful calibration. Its technology mandates require flexibility for areas with poor connectivity. But the core logic is sound: accountability mechanisms free resources for real workers by eliminating fake ones. The question isn’t whether MGNREGA should change—it’s whether the opposition’s real objection is to reform itself, or to losing control of the patronage machine that reform threatens. K Rajaram IRS 201225 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZoo%2BStUcSr83fVniU3WoaL6%3D6fRcYnqGeH4Y%3D4nBATS43A%40mail.gmail.com.
