Rural jobs scheme shows modest uptick in August, but trails 2025 MGNREGA levels

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Since the operationalisation of the new jobs programme, 6,40,779 new Gramin Rozgar Guarantee cards have been issued across States and Union Territories. | Photo Credit: G. N. Rao

In its second month of operation, the government’s new rural employment scheme, Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-GRAM G), registered a modest improvement in employment generation. However, a year-on-year comparison with MGNREGA for August shows a 9% decline in the availability of work for the rural poor.

In its first month of implementation, the new scheme reported a 48.01% decline in persondays generated compared with MGNREGA, falling from 17.65 crore in July 2025 to 9.18 crore in July 2026. August showed a smaller year-on-year decline than July. Persondays generated fell from 12.12 crore in August 2025 to 11.03 crore this year, a decline of 9.01%.

Taken together, July and August 2026 showed lower employment generation than the corresponding period in 2025. Cumulative persondays fell from 29.78 crore to 20.21 crore, a decline of 32.13%.

However, in both July and August, the gap could be wider since no persondays were generated in West Bengal in 2025. The implementation of MGNREGA in West Bengal was stalled in December 2021, with the Central government officially freezing all financial disbursements to the State on March 9, 2022.

According to senior officials in the Union Rural Development Ministry, it is too early to judge the performance of the new scheme. They said the 60-day pause in agricultural activity has also contributed to the dip in employment generation. So far, 16 States and Union Territories have notified their respective peak agricultural periods.

The Act allows States to tailor these periods to local agricultural calendars and, where necessary, issue area-specific notifications for districts, blocks, or gram panchayats based on agro-climatic conditions and local cropping patterns. This flexibility enables the employment programme to complement, rather than compete with, peak agricultural activity.

Since the operationalisation of the new jobs programme, 6,40,779 new Gramin Rozgar Guarantee cards have been issued across States and Union Territories.

While the government has reiterated that workers can continue to access employment using job cards issued under MGNREGA, it has also clarified that every worker registered under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, irrespective of the e-KYC status of job cards, has been migrated to VB-GRAM G.

The Ministry has further underlined that pending e-KYC does not prevent a worker from demanding or receiving employment.

So far, the e-KYC of 15.89 crore workers has been completed, including 10.27 crore of the 10.84 crore active workers, or approximately 95%. 

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