by Kate McFarland | Jul 1, 2016 | News
Varun Gandhi, Member of Parliament of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has endorsed basic income in an article published in The Hindu on June 30, 2016. The BJP, the ruling party in India, is the largest political party in not only India but (as of March 2015) the world, with 88 million registered members.
In his article, Gandhi calls for more basic income studies to be conducted in India, and delineates an impressive list of benefits that he expects from the policy:
A regular unconditional basic income, scaled up through pilots, and rolled out slowly and carefully, seems ideal for India. It can help improve living conditions including sanitation in our villages, providing them with access to better drinking water, while improving children’s nutrition. Regular basic income payments can help institute rational responses to illness or hunger, enabling households to fund their health expenses instead of encountering a vicious cycle of debt. It can help reduce child labour, while facilitating an increase in school spending. It can transform villages, enabling the growth of productive work, leading to a sustained increase in income. It could cut inequality; grow the economy; all while offering the pursuit of happiness.
Varun Gandhi has nearly 270,000 followers on Twitter and over 3 million Facebook fans.
Feroze Varun Gandhi, “Why we need to talk about a basic income,” The Hindu, July 1, 2016.
Image from Varun Gandhi’s life in pics (NDTV)
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by Kate McFarland | Jun 27, 2016 | Research
Rasmus Schjoedt is the Social Policy Specialist at Development Pathways, a UK-based consultancy firm that “brings together a group of social policy experts with extensive international experience of working on social protection, social development, gender, financial inclusion, and livelihoods.”
Development Pathways states that its vision is the “global adoption of transformative social and economic policies that guarantee the realisation of the rights for all,” and its mission is to “provide creative evidence based and context specific solutions to social and economic policy challenges.”
Schjoedt wrote the April 25, 2016 edition of the Pathways’ Perspective blog on the topic of basic income experiment conducted in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh from 2011 to 2012.
Despite a short implementation period and relatively low benefit levels, the effects were impressive: by the end of the project it was possible to see significant improvements in living conditions, nutrition and education.
With almost half of the world’s poorest living in India, how the country approaches social protection in the coming years will be very important for the global efforts to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. A universal basic income could be an important part of the solution.
Schjoedt describes the experiment and its results in some detail in a paper available for download here.
Reference
Rasmus Schjoedt, “India’s Basic Income Experiment,” Pathways’ Perspectives, April 25, 2016.
Image Source: Yann via Wikimedia Commons
by Josh Martin | Jun 19, 2016 | News
Jhabvala’s article is a great introduction to the basic income debate in India. The article walks through India’s basic income pilot projects as well as an examination of current government spending programs, concluding that more research should be done in order to slowly shift India to a basic income while protecting the most vulnerable citizens.
Renana Jhabvala, “India’s time for unconditional cash transfers“, The Financial Express, May 17 2016.
by Josh Martin | Mar 3, 2016 | News
The Goa Foundation, an environmental NGO in India has developed a list of reforms for the mining industry, among which is to implement a citizen’s dividend which will act as a universal basic income for all. Their chief argument rests on the fact that minerals are non-renewable inherited assets owned by the state and that a citizen’s dividend will act as a new non-wasting asset of at least equal value to the minerals that may be sold.
The Goa Foundation looks toward the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend as a model to be followed in setting up the Future Generations Fund.
They want to invest the equivalent amount of money of mineral sales into a Future Generations Fund, from which “all the real income from the fund is distributed equally to all citizens in the form of the citizen’s dividend.”
“We want this implemented across India and globally. It is fair, our right and our duty to our children.” said Rahul Basu, member of Goa Foundation.
To read more, click on the following link:
Rahul Basu, “A Citizen’s Dividend from Mining”, Basic Income India, 11 February 2016.
by Josh Martin | Jul 16, 2015 | News
Sarath Davala, an independent sociologist based in Hyderabad, has begun a new blog focused on basic income in India. Davala worked closely on the Indian Basic Income Pilot projects with Renana Jhabvala, Soumya Kapoor Mehta, and Guy Standing, authoring Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India.
On the blog’s website, the reader can find blog posts tailored to basic income in India, information on their book, and the final report for the Indian Basic Income Pilot Study.
To visit the blog, Basic Income India, click here.
