“Opinion | Building Rural India’s Future:Why Budget’s Push For Productive Employment Matters”, News 18, February 03, 2026
“The Union Budget has quietly marked a turning point in how India thinks about rural employment. By allocating Rs 95,692 crore to the new Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission Gramin (VB-G RAMG), while structurally transitioning away from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) framework, the government has signalled that rural policy is moving from a welfare-era architecture to a productivity-era design.
This shift is not cosmetic. It reflects a deeper recognition: India in 2026 is not India in 2005. The challenge is no longer only how to provide subsistence wages, but how to build rural economies that generate durable income, productive assets, and long-term growth.
A Long-Overdue Change
For two decades, the employment guarantee model functioned as a consumption-support instrument. It injected liquidity and provided fallback wages. But the structural weaknesses of that framework became too large to ignore…….”
Read full article at news18.com
