Will NYAY be Funded by Increased Tax? Congress Leader Clarifies

In an interview to The Quint, Congress’ Praveen Chakravarty said NYAY will be a “federal scheme”.

Image of The Quint’s Nishtha Gautam (L) with Congress’ Praveen Chakravarty.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/ The Quint)

Days after Congress President Rahul Gandhi announced the NYAY scheme that is said to benefit the poorest of the poor who have been “left behind”, The Quint reached out to Praveen Chakravarty, Chairperson, Congress Data Analytic Cell, on this scheme.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

“The poorest 5 crore households of India will get a standard amount of Rs 6,000 a month, and Rs 72,000 a year. I think it’s absolute rubbish to say that there was no poverty reduction. Now, as the Congress president called it, this is the FINAL assault on poverty,” said Praveen Chakravarty, Chairperson, Congress Data Analytic Cell, on NYAY.

What does NYAY intend to do?

The motivation for the scheme is a recognition of the fact that headline economic growth does not translate into real incomes and income growth for the bottom-most sections of our society. As a government, as a policy-maker, we must have a direct support in our systems and a guarantee scheme, for those people that are left behind.

How are you going to identify the beneficiaries of this scheme?

It’s actually not that hard to identify the 5 crore poorest, who will benefit from NYAY. This wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago. But today we have a variety of data data sets and information, that includes socio-economic class, caste censuses,... Second, there have been advances in data science, data analytics and technology, which we can all use to triangulate, to try to identify the poorest.

Where is the money for NYAY coming from? Because P Chidambaram said that it’s going to be around 1.8 % of the GDP...Can our economy afford 7,00,00,00 crore crore total subsidy?

First and foremost, this is a federal scheme...it will be a combined scheme of the Centre and the states.