318 permissible works, and a plan each village has to write

A backgrounder sets out what replaced MGNREGA: a 125-day guarantee, four thematic areas, and Viksit Gram Panchayat Plans built on GIS asset mapping and approved by the Gram Sabha.

What happened

• The VB-G RAM G Act, 2025 came into force on 1 July 2026 across all rural areas, with the transition from Mahatma Gandhi NREGA described as seamless and digital systems operational from the start.
• The Act guarantees 125 days of wage employment every financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer for unskilled manual work, across four thematic areas - water security, core rural infrastructure, livelihood-related infrastructure and mitigation of extreme weather events.
• Its institutional core is the Viksit Gram Panchayat Plan (VGPP): participatory and saturation-oriented planning with Gram Sabha recommendation and approval, beginning with an inventory of existing assets across all schemes, using GIS, Yuktdhara and PM Gati Shakti for gap assessment and avoidance of duplication.
• Plans are consolidated at block, district, State and national level into a Viksit Bharat National Rural Infrastructure Stack, and the framework identifies 318 types of permissible works.
• Progress as of 24 September 2026: 10.88 crore active workers, 2.83 lakh assets created, more than 31.69 crore person-days, women's participation 61.65 per cent, employment on demand to over 2.81 crore workers from about 2.23 crore households, 97.17 lakh works under execution, 73.24 lakh approved works in reserve and around 20.16 lakh active worksites.

For Prelims

• The Act: the Viksit Bharat - Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025 replaced MGNREGA from 1 July 2026 and raised the statutory guarantee from 100 to 125 days; Section 37 carries the transitional provisions. The programme remains demand-driven - work must be provided when a household asks for it.
• What "saturation" means in current policy vocabulary: covering every eligible household or habitation in a defined area rather than a sample of beneficiaries - the approach behind campaigns such as the Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra and now built into village planning.
• Convergence means pooling funds and works from different schemes on one plan; the predecessor instrument was the Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP) prepared under the 14th and 15th Finance Commission grants, which the VGPP extends with asset mapping and a permissible works list.
• Yuktdhara is the ISRO-MoRD geospatial planning portal built on Bhuvan, holding thematic layers for watershed, land use and existing assets; PM Gati Shakti is the national master plan platform for infrastructure layers - using both for village planning is what makes duplication detectable.
• Why "water security" leads the four themes: the largest category of works under the predecessor programme was water conservation and land development, and watershed works are the ones that create durable assets rather than recurring earthwork.
• The Gram Sabha's role is statutory, not advisory: it recommends and approves the plan, which is the same authority structure the Forest Rights Act uses for claims and the PESA Act for scheduled areas - the three places where Indian law makes the village assembly the primary decision-maker.
• Social audit by independent units, the district Ombudsperson and proactive disclosure are the accountability mechanisms of a rural employment guarantee; the NMMS attendance app, rebuilt on 23 October, is the monitoring layer rather than the audit layer.
• Women's participation under the predecessor Act had a statutory floor of one third of beneficiaries and ran above 50 per cent for years - 61.65 per cent is a continuation of that pattern, driven by the absence of other local wage work for women.

For Mains

Syllabus: GS2.10 · GS3.2 · Linkage L1