Hindustan Surkhiyan Desk: Taking potshots at the Narendra Modi government over rising unemployment and “damaging” the economy, Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said his party’s minimum income guarantee scheme (Nyay) has thrown the BJP into total disarray. Gandhi, in an interview to PTI, said the ‘Nyay’ scheme has the twin objectives of giving money to the 20 per cent poorest families in India and remonetising the economy “damaged” by demonetisation.
On Monday, Gandhi announced that Rs 72,000 per year will be given as minimum income benefiting around 25 crore people belonging to the poorest sections, if his party is voted to power in the Lok Sabha polls. The Congress also announced that women from poor families will get Rs 72,000 per year directly in their bank accounts as part of the party’s income supplementing scheme.
“He has taken away from the farmers, he has snatched from the small and medium businesses, he’s taken away from the unemployed youth, he has extinguished the savings of mothers and sisters of this country. We want to return to India’s deprived sections what Modiji has snatched from them,” Gandhi said.
He said the ‘Nyay’ income guarantee scheme would be a surgical strike on poverty and prove to be game changer. The Congress chief said scheme is “fiscally perfectly doable” and will not be implemented “rashly like demonetization and GST of the BJP”.
Asked about apprehensions of some economists that ‘Nyay’, which entails an expenditure of Rs 3.6 lakh crore annually, could aggravate India’s fiscal deficit position, Gandhi said, “No, that’s not right.”
He said the party consulted a large number of economists and experts, studied numerous papers and other research material on this subject and run an extensive financial modelling exercise before deciding to include the plan in its Lok Sabha manifesto.
Taking a swipe at Modi, who announced the demonetisation of high value currency notes in a surprise move in November 2016, Gandhi said, “We’re not rash. We don’t take steps like demonetisation and GST without consultations, without conferring with the experts. We have vetted this, tested this, and fiscally ‘Nyay’ as a scheme is completely doable.”
The Congress president did not give a time line on when the party planned to make India poverty free and said ‘Nyay’ will first be tested through a pilot to “smoothen out any flaws”.
“We’re not going to do it the way GST was done. We are first going to run a short pilot project to smoothen out any flaws in the implementation process and then roll it out nationwide. We’re also going to set down a robust way of identifying the beneficiaries, so that no deserving family is left out,” he said.
Asked if the pilot will be run in Congress-ruled states, Gandhi said experts will decide on that.
“This is for the experts to decide. In the 10 years of the Congress-UPA government, we took 14 crore people out of poverty net. Our goal now is to finish the job,” he said.
Gandhi added that 20 per cent to 22 per cent families are living in poverty even today. Many of them have been pushed into this cycle by the prime minister’s demonetisation scheme and ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’ (GST), he noted. “Our goal is to completely eliminate poverty from India,” he said, describing ‘Nyay’ as the final assault on poverty.
