Centre notifies Rs 308/ day wages for Telangana under VB-G RAM G

Hyderabad: Daily wage workers in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh will now receive a baseline wage of Rs 308 and Rs 312 per day, respectively, following the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (VB-G RAM G) Act of 2025, which came into effect on Wednesday, July 1.

VB-G RAM G Act replaces the two-decade-old Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), introduced by the Congress-led UPA.

Under the new Act, the contribution ratio for Centre and states is 60:40. For north-eastern and Himalayan states, and the union territories with a legislature, the contribution will be on a 90:10 basis. It guarantees up to 125 days of wage employment a year.

According to the notification issued by the Union Ministry of Rural Development, the daily wage ranges between Rs 300 and Rs 409 across states and Union Territories (UTs). There is an overall 10 per cent hike from Rs 298.8/day to Rs 327.4/day.

Haryana received the highest wage rate at Rs 409/day followed by Goa at Rs 406/day and Kerala at Rs 401/day.

Workers in Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh will receive Rs 300, a 24 per cent wage hike. Sikkim will have a special wage rate for high-altitude regions. The daily wage for the gram panchayats of Gnathang, Lachung and Lachen is at Rs 450/day.

New wage rates

Rs 300 daily wage rate

The wage rates for 21 states has been fixed at Rs 300. These include Gujarat, Manipur, Mizoram, Rajasthan, Odisha, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Meghalaya, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam, Tripura, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh (non-scheduled areas), Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland.

Congress says wages ‘unjustifiably low’

The Congress demanded the repeal of the rural employment scheme, claiming the new wages are “unjustifiably low”.

The party wants the minimum wage rate to be fixed at Rs 500.

Congress general secretary and former rural development minister Jairam Ramesh said the Modi Government has notified the VB-G RAM G and the daily wage rate due to workers under the scheme. “The injustice of the Modi Government’s new law aside, the wages due to workers are also unjustifiably low – largely at Rs. 300 per day,” he said on X.

Congress leader and MP Saptagiri Ulaka said the government is changing the whole nature of the original scheme which is “very unfortunate”.

The Modi government has introduced the VB-G RAM G scheme not to strengthen MGNREGA, but to dismantle it, he alleged.

MGNREGA was a rights-based, demand-driven employment guarantee scheme which the government has converted into a supply-driven, government-driven scheme under which the Centre will decide which state would get what money based on the normative allocation that is adopted by the 16th Finance Commission to distribute the single divisible pool of taxes among states, he said.

The Modi government claims that 125 days of employment will be provided under the scheme, but that is not the reality, Ulaka claimed.

“The allocation for Haryana, for example, stands at Rs 984 crore, of which the state must contribute 40 per cent — amounting to Rs 393 crore. Despite this expenditure, only 13.78 days of work are currently being generated in Haryana. If this were to be increased to 125 days, Haryana would have to spend an additional Rs 5,786 crore,” he said.

He said VB GRAM G has been notified as of today, “yet no one has any information regarding how operations under it will be conducted”.

“Officials have simply uploaded it to the portal, while the Gram Sabhas remain completely unaware. The rights of villagers have been snatched away and handed over to officials,” he alleges.