The famous “Garibi Hatao” (poverty alleviation) concept launched by Indira Gandhi is back again in the political discourse, almost half a century later. This scheme launched in 1971 won her a spectacular victory in the general election that year, notwithstanding that it was close to the Bangladesh liberation war in which India played a major role. To be precise 48 years later Indira’s grandson Rahul Gandhi, who is now the President of the Indian National Congress, has floated his Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) which is minimum income scheme. It became a bit difficult for Rahul Gandhi to explain the scheme and hence it was muddled and it was finally left to his lieutenants to explain later how the 50 million Indian families in the poorest 20 per cent of India’s population would get Rs 6,000 monthly.
To explain in simple terms the scheme that the Congress is promising is Rs 6,000 per month to about 5 crore households. The party says that, after study, it came to the conclusion that Rs 12,000 per month should be the minimum income level for a household and that the average income level for the poorest 20 per cent is currently Rs 6,000. So it is promising flat income support of Rs 6,000 per month to these families, which comes out to Rs 72,000 a year. Economists and political observers calculated that Indian taxpayers will pay a whopping Rs 3.6 lakh crore extra to support this scheme that some describe as ‘Garibi Hatao 2.0’. That would be just under two per cent of India’s Gross Domestic Product, a huge outlay. Will the Indian taxpayers agree to this scheme? While the jugglery in statistics continues, apparently it seems that this scheme of NYAY will be difficult to implement.
In some ways the debate over these schemes is replicating similar sentiments that took place in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance years, when the government then introduced the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme or MGNREGA which gave an assurance of 100 working days a year for those who wanted it, particularly in the rural sector. This scheme was a success but the mode of payment to the actual labourers became a contentious issue and corruption among the contractors awarding the job creeped in. However, the scheme helped dent poverty, reduced distress migration and raised the bargaining power of rural labourers, especially among lower castes and women, the biggest beneficiaries of the programme.
When Narendra Modi assumed the South Block office in 2014, after the BJP had spent years arguing against MGNREGA, he called the programme a “living monument” to Congress failure. However due to the scheme’s tremendous success in the rural sector, the Modi government did not purge the scheme. A scheme will only be successful if the people availing benefits at the ground level second it. Targeting the poor and identifying them as genuine needy has been one of the biggest problems for India’s welfare programmes, and NYAY will be no different.
Critics believe that the only period in which millions of Indians were lifted out of poverty and into the middle classes was in that brief period when the licence raj ended in 1993 and millions of new jobs were created by private enterprise. What India requires is creation of jobs. Modi government has created and honed the skills but is slithering away when asked by the opposition on the numbers of job created. BJP had promised during 2014 general elections that they will be creating two crore jobs a year but there is no data as of now to support it. With the service, construction and manufacturing sector not doing so well what India needs is burgeoning of more private enterprise so that the regular jobs can be created.
