By Sujit Bhar
When the Supreme Court bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta recently refused to entertain the centre’s plea against the Calcutta High Court’s June 18 order, it did more than uphold a legal position—it restored a semblance of dignity and survival for millions of impoverished rural citizens of West Bengal.
The Calcutta High Court had directed that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) be implemented in the state prospectively from August 1, 2025, while allowing the centre to continue its inquiry into alleged irregularities.
The Supreme Court’s dismissal of the centre’s challenge, in effect, ensures that the long-withheld lifeline of rural employment is revived after nearly three years of suspension.
The Calcutta High Court’s order had struck a careful balance—it neither absolved the state government of the corruption charges that prompted the centre to halt MGNREGA funding nor permitted the centre to indefinitely withhold a statutory right guaranteed under a parliamentary Act. As the High Court remarked: “The scheme of the Act does not envisage a situation where the scheme will be put to cold storage for eternity.”
This was a crucial assertion. MGNREGA is not merely a welfare scheme—it is a legal entitlement. Under the 2005 Act, every adult member of a rural household is guaranteed 100 days of wage employment in a financial year, provided they volunteer to do unskilled manual work. By freezing the scheme for three years in West Bengal, the centre effectively suspended a statutory right, a move that had no legislative sanction. The High Court rightly observed that while the centre had powers to regulate and supervise implementation, it could not extinguish the scheme itself in a particular state.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to interfere affirms this balance. It sends a message that accountability cannot come at the cost of people’s survival—that administrative prudence must coexist with social justice. In essence, the judiciary has reaffirmed the constitutional ethos of welfare, even as it upheld the centre’s authority to investigate misuse of public funds.
THE RATIONALE OF MGNREGA
To understand the gravity of the present case, one must return to the roots of MGNREGA. The scheme, enacted in 2005 during the UPA-I government, was one of the most ambitious social security initiatives in independent India. Conceived under the leadership of then Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and driven by the political vision of Sonia Gandhi and Dr Jean Drèze, MGNREGA aimed to guarantee the “right to work” as a measure against rural poverty and distress migration.
It was a response to the agrarian crisis of the early 2000s—a time marked by farmer suicides, unemployment, and deepening rural distress. For the first time, work was made a legal entitlement rather than a discretionary dole. The scheme sought to create durable rural assets—ponds, wells, embankments, and rural roads—while injecting purchasing power directly into the hands of the poorest.
Critics had initially dismissed it as a populist or fiscally irresponsible policy. However, MGNREGA’s impact was undeniable. It transformed the economic landscape in many parts of rural India—particularly in drought-prone and marginalized regions. It offered women and Dalits a new-found financial autonomy and curbed distress migration to cities.
Frankly, such a job guarantee is not based on economically sound principles, simply because while it does bring into its fold starving millions, it does not create anything as an end-product. This was and will remain a politically motivated scheme. Such schemes had been put in place even in the Roman Empire, where starvation was as rampant as the creation of grand palaces. When showpiece events, such as gruesome events at the Coliseum were not enough to suppress the people’s hunger, such manual labour was instituted as a means to suppress possible uprisings.
This scheme takes a lot from such ancient schemes, and it also proves that successive governments have failed to ease the hunger of the growing populace. However, economics apart, this had proved to be an effective political tool.
Even its opponents were eventually compelled to acknowledge its resilience. Ironically, the same BJP-led government that once dismissed it as a “living monument to Congress failure”, found itself under Prime Minister Narendra Modi increasing MGNREGA allocations during the Covid-19 pandemic as millions of migrant workers returned home jobless. Necessity, it seemed, had trumped ideology.
THE THREE-YEAR FREEZE
West Bengal had been one of the leading implementers of MGNREGA. The state, with its vast rural base and history of agrarian dependence, had used the scheme effectively to generate employment in villages and semi-rural regions. However, from December 2021, the centre suspended MGNREGA funds to the state, citing widespread irregularities and corruption in job card generation, wage disbursement, and project implementation.
The Ministry of Rural Development alleged that in some districts, fake job cards were created and funds were siphoned off without actual work being done. The centre also cited non-compliance with central audit directives and failure to act against erring officials. The Trinamool Congress (TMC)-led state government, in turn, accused the centre of “political vendetta”, arguing that poor workers were being punished for no fault of their own.
As the dispute escalated, MGNREGA wages for millions of beneficiaries were withheld. Reports from rural Bengal painted a grim picture—villagers forced into debt, families skipping meals, and labour migration resuming out of sheer desperation. Civil society groups described the situation as “economic strangulation.”
The centre’s defence was that it had the right to suspend funding until irregularities were addressed. But as the Calcutta High Court pointed out, that power cannot amount to a permanent shutdown. The Act provides sufficient provisions for audits, recoveries, and criminal proceedings against misuse—but it does not authorize the denial of work to the innocent.
THROWING THE BABY AWAY WITH THE BATHWATER
The metaphor could not be more apt. Yes, there were irregularities—there often are in large-scale public welfare schemes. But to scrap the scheme entirely, or to deprive an entire population of its benefits, was akin to punishing the patient to cure the disease.
For millions of rural families, MGNREGA wages are not charity—they are subsistence. A three-year freeze translated into a humanitarian crisis. It denied them the means to buy food, educate their children, or access basic healthcare. In effect, the freeze undermined Article 21 of the Constitution—the right to life and livelihood.
In a country where job creation has failed to keep pace with population growth, and where the informal sector remains the largest employer, such schemes are not mere “populist tools”, but structural necessities. The Indian economy, despite boasting of high GDP numbers, continues to show declining per capita income and weak labour absorption. Data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) shows that unemployment in rural India has hovered between six and eight percent in recent years—a staggering number when converted into absolute terms.
The irony is inescapable: the same government that once called MGNREGA a relic of inefficiency was forced to rely on it as a lifeline during the pandemic, when urban and rural unemployment surged. If the BJP government today finds itself unable to provide alternative employment opportunities, its resistance to the scheme becomes not ideological, but hypocritical.
JUDICIAL PRUDENCE
The High Court’s June 18 order, now upheld implicitly by the Supreme Court, does more than restore the scheme in Bengal. It also establishes a precedent in centre-state relations and welfare governance. It recognizes the centre’s authority to investigate corruption, but draws a constitutional red line against arbitrary deprivation.
The Court specifically allowed the centre to “impose special conditions, restrictions and regulations” for the scheme’s reimplementation in West Bengal. This means that transparency and accountability mechanisms can be tightened—perhaps through digital attendance, real-time wage tracking, or third-party social audits.
But most crucially, the judgment reinstates a moral truth: punitive governance cannot replace welfare governance. Investigations can and must continue, but the poorest citizens cannot be collateral damage in a political tussle.
At the same time, the allegations against the West Bengal government cannot be brushed aside. Several central audits and independent reports have indicated discrepancies in wage disbursement, inflated muster rolls, and fake job cards. The Trinamool Congress’s defensive posture and failure to ensure prompt corrective measures worsened the situation.
Transparency in MGNREGA implementation must not be a political slogan—it must be institutionalized. The state government’s reluctance to act on audit recommendations has provided the centre with a convenient handle to claim moral superiority. In the process, ordinary villagers—who neither falsified records nor controlled funds—became the worst sufferers.
The lesson here is that federal cooperation cannot be replaced by confrontation. Both the state and the centre have constitutional obligations—to their citizens first, and to each other second.
THE FUTURE: RETOOLING MGNREGA
If MGNREGA is to endure as a pillar of rural welfare, it must evolve. The High Court’s directive to implement it “prospectively” from August 1, 2025, offers an opportunity to modernize the scheme rather than merely restart it.
There can be several possible pathways to make MGNREGA more efficient and future-ready:
- Digital integration and transparency: The use of geo-tagging, Aadhaar-linked attendance, and direct benefit transfers (DBT) can reduce ghost beneficiaries and wage delays. The government’s existing e-FMS (Electronic Fund Management System) can be strengthened with public dashboards for transparency.
- Linking work to climate resilience: MGNREGA can pivot towards climate-adaptive work—water conservation, afforestation, flood management, and renewable energy projects. These not only create durable assets, but also prepare rural communities for ecological crises.
- Urban extension of MGNREGA: With rising urban unemployment and informalisation of work, the idea of an urban employment guarantee—as some states like Kerala and Rajasthan have experimented with—deserves national consideration. A limited urban variant could supplement MGNREGA’s rural focus.
- Skill-based employment and rural enterprises: The future of MGNREGA could incorporate semi-skilled tasks and link beneficiaries with rural industries, cooperatives, and micro-enterprises. This would bridge the gap between welfare and productivity.
- Independent oversight: The creation of district-level ombudsmen and citizen monitoring committees—already part of the Act, but seldom empowered—should be revived. Transparency must be built not on partisan control, but community oversight.
RESTORING THE PROMISE OF WORK AND DIGNITY
The Supreme Court’s refusal to interfere with the Calcutta High Court’s order is, at its heart, a reaffirmation of the idea that no citizen should be deprived of livelihood due to administrative paralysis or political confrontation.
Yes, irregularities in MGNREGA’s implementation must be probed, and culprits punished. But governance cannot mean starvation as retribution. When the state denies work and wages to the poorest for three years, it violates not just law, but humanity.
In a nation where per capita GDP growth has slowed, and unemployment continues to haunt even the educated youth, schemes like MGNREGA are not relics—they are reminders of an unfulfilled constitutional promise: to secure to all citizens the right to livelihood and dignity.
As MGNREGA resumes in West Bengal, it will not just mark a policy restart—it will symbolize the restoration of faith in India’s welfare ethos, where even amid political rivalries, the poorest must not be forgotten.
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