New Delhi: As debate intensified over the Union government’s move to bring in the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB–G RAM G) Bill, 2025, which seeks to replace the UPA-era MGNREGA, official figures indicated that more than 16.3 lakh workers were recently removed from the scheme’s rolls.
Citing a report by The New Indian Express, the deletions were said to have taken place over a 36-day period, roughly a month before the Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on December 16. The data, covering the period from October 10 to November 14, reportedly triggered concern among rural workers and policy experts about possible exclusion from a law that guarantees employment.
The figures were disclosed by Minister of State for Rural Development Kamlesh Paswan in a written response to questions raised in the Lok Sabha by Samajwadi Party MPs Lalji Verma and Anand Bhadauriya.
Paswan explained that the removal of job cards was a routine process carried out by state governments under existing MGNREGS rules, The Wire reported.
He attributed the deletions to reasons such as fake or duplicate job cards, permanent migration, panchayats being reclassified as urban areas and deaths of beneficiaries, while asserting that digital verification requirements, including Aadhaar-based e-KYC, were not responsible for the removals.
The Opposition, which has been protesting against the new bill, countered this explanation by arguing that the timing of the deletions overlapped with the rollout of Aadhaar-linked e-KYC verification earlier this year.
According to the report, opposition members also cited estimates suggesting that during the same period, the number of deletions may have been significantly higher—nearly 27 lakh—coinciding with stricter enforcement of e-KYC compliance.
In his response, Paswan also indicated that by November, over 56% of active workers had completed the e-KYC process, while Aadhaar seeding had been carried out for nearly 99.7% of active records.
MGNREGA, which was launched in 2005 under the Congress-led UPA government, provided a legal guarantee of 100 days of employment on demand to every rural household, with the Union government bearing the funding responsibility.
The proposed legislation, however, seeks to introduce a new rural employment framework aligned with the government’s “Viksit Bharat @2047” vision, offering a statutory guarantee of 125 days of wage employment each financial year to rural households willing to undertake unskilled manual work.
However, the bill also seeks to reduce the Union government's share of wage payments from 90:10 to 60:40, and it specifies a period of sixty days in a fiscal year, covering the peak agricultural seasons of sowing and harvesting, during which no work under the new system shall be undertaken.
The recent deletions, officials noted, are part of a broader pattern. Earlier, on December 9, Union Rural Development Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan told the Lok Sabha that 4.57 crore MGNREGS job cards were deleted nationwide between 2019–20 and 2024–25, even as 6.54 crore new cards were issued during the same period.
Chouhan reiterated that the removal of job cards was a routine exercise undertaken by states and Union Territories, and maintained that the newly introduced digital systems—the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) and the Aadhaar Payment Bridge System (APBS)—were not used as grounds for deletions.
Opposition parties have strongly opposed the VB–G RAM G bill since its introduction, accusing the Narendra Modi-led government of dropping Mahatma Gandhi’s name out of an alleged fixation with renaming schemes. They further argued that the legislation weakens the legal right to work by converting it into a standard centrally sponsored scheme while transferring financial responsibility to the states.
Despite sustained protests and criticism, the bill has been cleared by both Houses of Parliament.