Rahul Gandhi said about G Ram G Bill… A nationwide front will be formed to get the bill returned.

New Delhi. After Parliament passed the ‘Developed India – Ji Ram Ji Bill’ in place of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), former Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Friday said that this proposed law is against the state and villages and a nationwide front will be formed to force the government to withdraw it. Parliament on Thursday approved the ‘Developed India – Ji Ram Ji Bill, 2025’.

This bill was passed in the Lok Sabha in the first day and in the Rajya Sabha late in the night. Rahul Gandhi posted on ‘X’, “Last night Modi government destroyed twenty years of MNREGA in a single day. Yes Ram Ji, the bill is not a “restructuring” of MNREGA. It removes the rights-based, demand-based guarantee and turns it into a limited scheme, which will be controlled from Delhi.

He alleged that the very structure of this bill is anti-state and anti-village. Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha said, “MNREGA gave bargaining power to rural labourers. By providing real alternatives, exploitation and forced migration reduced, wages increased, working conditions improved and at the same time rural infrastructure was created and revitalized. This is the power that this government wants to break.”

According to him, by setting limits on work and creating more avenues of exclusion from work, the Ji Ram Ji Bill weakens the only means of access that the rural poor had. Rahul Gandhi said, “We saw what MNREGA meant during the Covid-19 pandemic. It saved millions of people from hunger and debt when economies shut down and livelihoods were destroyed. The biggest beneficiaries of this were women, who contributed more than half of the total person-days year after year.

He said that when any employment program is limited, the first to be pushed out are women, Dalits, tribals, landless laborers and the poorest of the poor Other Backward Class (OBC) communities.

Rahul Gandhi said, “On top of that, this law was forcefully passed in Parliament without proper scrutiny. The opposition’s demand to send the bill to the standing committee was rejected. “A law that alters the rural social contract, affecting millions of workers, should never be imposed without serious committee review, expert consultation and public hearings.”

“Prime Minister Modi’s goals are clear: to weaken labour, weaken the bargaining power of rural India – especially Dalits, OBCs and tribals, centralize power and then sell it under the slogan of ‘reform’,” he alleged, adding that MNREGA is one of the most successful poverty alleviation and empowerment programs in the world. Rahul Gandhi asserted, “We will not allow this government to destroy the last line of defense of the rural poor. We will stand with workers, panchayats and states, building a nationwide front to defeat this move and withdraw this legislation.”