NYAY: Garibi bachao, not hatao | The Indian Express

NYAY: Garibi bachao, not hatao | The Indian Express

Written by Surjit S Bhalla |Updated: April 4, 2019 1:30:42 am

The writer is Contributing Editor at The Indian Express, and Consulting Editor at Network 18

NYAY: Garibi bachao, not hatao

Congress’s programme of poverty elimination is so flawed that its advocacy before an election is akin to political suicide.

At the time Indira Gandhi coined the slogan, garibi hatao in 1971, India was a very very poor country with over 80 per cent of the population deemed absolutely poor, according to the official Tendulkar poverty line. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar)

It is now official. After the release of the manifesto, the Congress believes its NYAY programme for poverty elimination is a game changer, a political winner, and a winner of advanced thinking on the subject. To bolster this claim, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said the party had consulted “all big economists, without telling anyone, without giving any speeches” on the Nyuntam Aay Yojana or NYAY. A news report quoted Rahul Gandhi as saying: “We were engaged in this work for six months. Take the list of all big economists of the world, we consulted them. Raghuram Rajan… one by one. The first thing we came to know that there should be a minimum income line. We calculated and the result was that the minimum income line should be Rs 12,000 per month.” (emphasis added).