(Bloomberg) -- India's main opposition Congress party promised to implement a minimum income guarantee program for the poor if it triumphs in the country's general election this year.
“We cannot build a new India while millions of our brothers and sisters suffer the scourge of poverty,” Congress President Rahul Gandhi said on Twitter on Jan. 28. “If voted to power in 2019, the Congress is committed to a Minimum Income Guarantee for every poor person, to help eradicate poverty & hunger.”
January 28, 2019
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The pledge comes as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration implements a raft of populist measures ahead of the polls due by May, including an extension of government job and education placement quotas to millions of people. In the works is another plan to transfer roughly $9.8 billion directly to farmers and ease their financial stress instead of offering subsidies, people with knowledge of the matter have said.
Senior Congress leader and former finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said the nationwide program would be an adaptation of a universal basic income scheme.
"It is not UBI," Chidambaram said in an interview to Bloomberg Quint on Tuesday. "Under UBI the same amount of money is given to everyone, including you and me. This minimum income guarantee is progressive." Some of the “demerit subsidies” would be terminated to make fiscal space for such a program, he said.
A quasi universal basic income program for 75 percent of the rural population could cost about 2.64 trillion rupees ($37 billion) or 1.3 percent of the gross domestic product, India's former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian and others wrote in an article.
The Congress party had previously pledged to write off farmer loans ahead of state elections held in December, and followed through on its promise in three states where it won.
--With assistance from Vrishti Beniwal.
To contact the reporter on this story: Iain Marlow in New Delhi at imarlow1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Unni Krishnan at ukrishnan2@bloomberg.net;Ruth Pollard at rpollard2@bloomberg.net
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