PM Kisan Vs Minimum Income: Modi’s Scheme Will Be More Fiscally Responsible, Easier To Implement

Transcript:

Today, we discuss why PM Modi’s Kisan scheme is much better for the country than Rahul’s Rs 72,000 ‘promise’.

In what seems like the final roll of the dice by Rahul Gandhi before the Lok Sabha polls, the Congress president has promised a minimum income of Rs 72,000 annually for the bottom 20 per cent of India’s population.

This is possibly India’s most fiscally irresponsible idea, or the biggest pre-election con job the nation has ever seen.

Let’s do the math - at 72,000 rupees per annum for five crore households, the scheme will cost a whopping 3.6 lakh crore rupees annually, which is roughly around 2 per cent of the GDP and an enormous 13 per cent of the Union budget.

In the 2020 interim budget, subsidies were targeted to rise to around 1.4 per cent of the GDP. If Rahul’s scheme is launched in April 2019, it by itself will work out to a hefty 1.7 per cent of the country’s GDP.

Basically, what the scheme will do is add to the subsidy bill, and the average person will probably end up losing every other subsidy - from gas, fertilizer, electricity, crop prices, MGNREGA, and even health.

Also, from past experiences we’ve learnt that the Congress will not take the fall for its fiscally irresponsible decisions.

So now consider Narendra Modi’s PM Kisan scheme, which seeks to pay Rs 6,000 per year for 12 crore small and marginal farmers - it’s shallower, but reaches more people. If the scheme is spread to only 5 crore people, which is the target of Rahul Gandhi’s scheme, it works out at around 15,000 rupees per household. This money is already being paid out in current terms, and its terminal value by 2024 would be around 17,500 rupees.

Overall, the Modi scheme would be less irresponsible, more universal, and easier to implement since the focus is only on farmers, and not all and sundry.

Having said that, with Rahul putting his big idea out there, the Modi government will have to respond with improved proposals. Hopefully, they will be less fiscally irresponsible than the Rahul Gandhi one.

One may conclude that Rahul Gandhi’s NYAY may really be an A-NYAY for the nation.

And with this, that’s a wrap for today’s episode, this is Shivangi Uniyal signing off, see you in the next one.

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Take a bigger bite of the story here: RaGa’s Minimum Income Scheme Is Either Fiscally Irresponsible Or Con-Job, Or Both

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