A regular unconditional basic income, scaled up through pilots, and rolled out slowlyand carefully, seems ideal for India. It can help improve living conditions includingsanitation in our villages, providing them with access to better drinking water, whileimproving children’s nutrition.
Regular basic income payments can help instituterational responses to illness or hunger, enabling households to fund their healthexpenses instead of encountering a vicious cycle of debt. It can help reduce childlabour, while facilitating an increase in school spending. It can transform villages,enabling the growth of productive work, leading to a sustained increase in income. Itcould cut inequality; grow the economy; all while offering the pursuit of happiness.
Why not have one universal basic subsidy that covers everything (perhaps excepthealth and education) and let people decide how they will spend it, rather thanhaving a multifariously fractured system of welfare, where multiple authorities giveout different subsidies (food, housing, education, health) based on imperfectknowledge of what people need and deserve.
SEWA claims that the number of extant government “welfare schemes” exceeds350, though most of those programmes are not much more than a name. Why notreplace all of them by a single Universal Basic Income of, say, Rs 250 a week, whichentitles every adult resident to a minimum weekly income as long as they verify theiridentity using Aadhaar. At the very least, this will reduce poverty and free up thebureaucracy to do other things.
2017 Global Hunger Index: The Inequalities Of Hunger
According to the 2017 hunger index report, India is ranked 100th out of 119 countries, and has the third highest score in all of Asia -- only Afghanistan and Pakistan are ranked worse.
The country's serious hunger level is driven by high child malnutrition and underlines need for stronger commitment to the social sector, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) said in its report.
At 31.4, India's 2017 GHI (Global Hunger Index) score is at the high end of the 'serious' category, and is one of the main factors pushing South Asia to the category of worst performing region on the GHI this year.
As per the report, India ranks below many of its neighbouring countries such as China (29th rank), Nepal (72), Myanmar (77), Sri Lank (84) and Bangladesh (88). It is ahead of Pakistan (106) and Afghanistan (107).
