Steps to Fight Against Poverty in India

In the run-up to the elections now, schemes guaranteeing income to the poor through budgetary transfers are announced by both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and therefore the Congress. Actually, the BJP’s Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-Kisan), paying farm households below a threshold of ₹6,000 a year, is already in situ. An income-support scheme for anybody section of the population is grossly inequitable. We will consider agricultural laborers and concrete pavement dwellers as equally deserving of support as poor farmers. While it's the case that at the present agricultural subsidies attend farmers alone, these are intended as production subsidies then channeled thanks to the criticality of food production to all or any.

On the opposite hand, a welfare program cannot ethically be speaking, exclude those equally placed. The BJP’s hurried introduction of its scheme also came with an overshooting of the fiscal deficit target, suggesting that it involves borrowing to consume, a fiscally imprudent practice. The PM-Kisan has, however, been dwarfed by the promise of the Nyuntam Any Yojana (NYAY) of the Congress, which envisages an annual transfer 12 times greater to the poorest 20% of households. While this scheme isn't discriminatory, it's severely challenged by the difficulty of beneficiary identification in real-time.

Both the schemes on display, but NYAY especially, are criticized as running into the absence of fiscal space. this is often really neither the case nor of the essence, the latter being the role of income transfers in eradicating as against alleviating poverty in India.

By: Jyoti Nayak

Birla School, Pilani