India's Rural Job Guarantee Law of 2005 Recorded 389.09 Crore Person-Days of Paid Work in the Covid Year 2020-21 and Was Succeeded on 1 July 2026 by an Act That Guarantees 125 Days

India’s rural job guarantee law, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005, recorded 389.09 crore person-days of paid work in 2020-21, the Covid year, the Ministry of Rural Development told the Lok Sabha on 30 July 2024. The Act stood repealed from 1 July 2026, when the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025, known as VB-G RAM G, came into force across all rural areas with a guarantee of 125 days.

A person-day is one person working one day, and a crore is ten million. Figures below come from the Ministry or from the audit and research papers named next to them.

Where the law stands on 27 October 2026

The Lok Sabha passed the VB-G RAM G Bill on 18 December 2025 and the Rajya Sabha passed it that night, All India Radio reported on 19 December. The President gave assent on 21 December 2025, according to the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s press office.

A Ministry of Rural Development backgrounder posted on 11 May 2026 says the Government of India notified commencement in all rural areas from 1 July 2026, and that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) of 2005 “stands repealed from the same date.” The latest official document consulted for this article, a Ministry note of 29 September 2026, repeats that the new Act came into force on 1 July 2026 and has been rolled out in all rural areas.

Employment under the old Act continued until that date. The 11 May backgrounder says job cards with completed e-KYC, an electronic identity check, stay valid until new Gramin Rozgar Guarantee Cards are issued, and works under way on 1 July may continue under the new law. Each state has to notify its own scheme within six months of commencement.

What the 2005 Act promised

The Act guaranteed at least 100 days of wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer for unskilled manual work, the Ministry’s question-and-answer note of November 2021 says. The same note calls it a demand-driven programme: money moves from the Centre to a state according to the demand for work in that state.

A household registers with its gram panchayat, the village council, and applies for work. If work is not provided within 15 days, an unemployment allowance falls due. The gram sabha, the assembly of all village voters, sets the order of priority for works, a role explained in tuput’s piece on how panchayats work. Works include water conservation, land development, rural roads and sanitation, and the cost of materials and skilled labour may not exceed 40 percent of a project.

Two top-ups existed. The Ministry told the Lok Sabha in July 2024 that Scheduled Tribe households in forest areas, if they hold no private property other than land rights under the Forest Rights Act, get 50 more days, and that up to 50 additional days can be given in notified drought or disaster areas. States may also add days from their own funds.

From 200 districts to every rural district

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) records that the Act came into force in 200 districts on 2 February 2006. A further 130 districts followed in 2007-08, and the remaining 266 were notified from 1 April 2008. The Ministry’s 2021 note says the Act was running in 644 districts.

The Ministry itself asked the CAG in August 2006 to audit the first 200 districts. For 2006-07 the audit report quotes the Ministry’s figures: 3.81 crore households registered, 2.12 crore asked for work and 2.10 crore received it. Of those, 0.22 crore households, or 22 lakh, received the full 100 days.

The person-days, year by year

The Ministry’s counts from its NREGASoft database give 389.09 crore person-days for 2020-21, 293.70 crore for 2022-23 and 309.01 crore for 2023-24. Its reply of 30 July 2024 says the 2020-21 figure came when the Covid impact “was on the peak” and that drought in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh raised the 2023-24 total. A PIB note of 26 August 2025 gives 290.60 crore for 2024-25.

For the Covid year, a Lok Sabha reply reported by Down to Earth on 3 August 2021 said 7.55 crore households received employment in 2020-21, 47 percent more person-days than in 2019-20, and 1.89 crore new job cards were issued. Women made up 58.15 percent of participation in 2024-25, or 440.7 lakh women, the August 2025 PIB note says, and it counts more than 86.98 lakh assets created by March 2025.

Average days per household, from a Lok Sabha reply reported by PTI on 29 July 2026, were 38 in 2008-09, 52 in 2020-21 and 2023-24, 50 in 2024-25 and 43 in 2025-26. The Ministry’s August 2025 note says 99.79 percent of rural households that demanded work in 2025-26 up to that date had been offered it.

How wages reached workers

The Act says wages are paid into individual bank or post office accounts, weekly or within a fortnight of the work. A delay compensation of 0.05 percent of the unpaid wage per day applies after the sixteenth day from the closing of the muster roll, the attendance sheet. Payment into accounts rests on account coverage, a subject covered in tuput’s article on the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana.

The Ministry’s August 2025 note puts electronic wage payment at 99.94 percent in 2024-25, up from 37 percent in 2013-14. The Aadhaar Payment Bridge, which sends money to the account linked to a worker’s Aadhaar number, became mandatory on 1 January 2024, a Rajya Sabha reply of 21 March 2025 says. Where it fails, payment can go through the account-based NACH route. The same reply puts Aadhaar seeding at 99.49 percent of 13.55 crore active workers.

An experiment in Andhra Pradesh measured what such systems change. Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar randomised the rollout of biometric Smartcards across 157 sub-districts and 19 million people. Workers collected payments 5.8 to 10 days sooner, household earnings from the scheme rose 24 percent while government outlays did not change, and the authors estimate leakage fell by 12.7 percentage points, a 41 percent reduction. The share of households reporting work on the scheme rose 7.1 percentage points.

Social audits, and what auditors found

The Act builds in a community check on its own spending. The Ministry’s note describes a social audit as a stock-taking by the people with the local administration of works, payments, labourers employed and materials used. The audit should happen at least once every six months, with a monthly concurrent audit of works. The Ministry’s 2025 note says every gram panchayat is to be audited at least twice a year. This is separate from the Right to Information Act of the same year.

The CAG found in 2008 that 354 of the gram panchayats it examined, across 20 states, had not held a six-monthly social audit forum in 2006-07. Farzana Afridi and Vegard Iversen studied Andhra Pradesh’s audits and found a positive but statistically insignificant effect on employment and a modest fall in leakage per labour-related irregularity. Material-related irregularities rose, and they found that repeated audits did not deter irregularities. They recommend time-bound follow-up with punishment for those responsible.

What independent studies found on wages, incomes and assets

Clement Imbert and John Papp compared districts that received the Act early with those that received it late. Their accepted manuscript estimates a 4.7 percent rise in casual wages and a 1.5 percent fall in private employment in the early districts, which they read as the programme drawing workers from private work and lifting private wages.

Muralidharan, Niehaus and Sukhtankar later studied a reform that improved how the scheme was implemented and whose rollout was randomised across sub-districts. In Econometrica in 2023 they report that it raised beneficiary households’ earnings by 14 percent and cut poverty by 26 percent, and that 86 percent of the income gain came from earnings outside the programme, through higher private-sector wages and employment.

Klaus Deininger and Yanyan Liu followed 4,013 Andhra Pradesh households over three survey rounds. Participants in districts exposed for one year ate more protein and energy, and those in districts exposed for two years built up more non-financial assets. The gains were largest for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and the poorest households. They found no evidence that participation raised private investment in land improvement.

On assets, Sudha Narayanan of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research summarised the evidence in 2016. She reports that Bhaskar and Yadav estimated a 6 percent rate of return on wells in Jharkhand, and that Tata-IWMI studies by Verma and Shah of 140 water assets in 75 villages in four states found that most recovered their cost within a year of completion. She adds that measuring asset impacts is difficult and the evidence is still scarce.

What the successor law changes

The VB-G RAM G Act raises the guarantee from 100 to 125 days for households whose adult members volunteer for unskilled manual work. States may notify a pause of 60 days in aggregate in a year for peak sowing and harvest, during which no works are taken up, and the 125 days are to be given in the rest of the year. Unemployment allowance stays, at not less than one-fourth of the wage for the first 30 days of the year and not less than one-half after that, and so does the 0.05 percent delay compensation.

Funding moves to a centrally sponsored scheme with a normative allocation, meaning the Centre fixes each state’s allocation by rules and the state bears spending beyond it. The 22 December 2025 PIB note gives a 60:40 Centre-state split, 90:10 for North Eastern and Himalayan states and full central funding for Union Territories without legislatures. The 11 May 2026 backgrounder puts the Central share for 2026-27 at Rs 95,692.31 crore and total outlay above Rs 1.51 lakh crore.

The government’s stated reasons, in the 22 December note, are that monitoring in several states found work missing on the ground, spending that did not match physical progress, machines used on labour-intensive works and digital attendance bypassed, and that only a small proportion of households completed 100 days after the pandemic. In the Rajya Sabha debate, All India Radio reported, some members asked for a Select Committee, said states had not been consulted and said the 60:40 split would burden poorer states, while others welcomed the move from 100 to 125 days.

The 29 September 2026 note reports that by 24 September VB-G RAM G had generated more than 31.69 crore person-days for 10.88 crore active workers, with women at 61.65 percent. It counts 15.17 crore Gramin Rozgar Guarantee Cards issued and an average wage of Rs 283.24 a day.