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ManishSrivastav
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Several years ago, in discussions with economists Vijay Joshi, Pranab Bardhan and others, i was persuaded that Universal Basic Income (UBI) was an idea that deserved serious consideration. They had done notable work on it, felt it was viable, but rued that no politician in India had taken it up, and urged me to do so. I wrote about UBI in this column, and spoke in Parliament and conferences around the nation. But at that time only one other peer spoke up for it, Jammu & Kashmir's Haseeb Drabu. Subsequently, in the Economic Survey of 2017, the government's then chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian took it up, raising hopes among many that a UBI would be launched.
But despite the Modi government's major thrust on cash transfers in lieu of subsidised physical goods, most notably with the world's largest such scheme for LPG cooking gas, it held back on launching a UBI. Meantime, other politicians have picked up the slack and there is now a political race to outdo each other with new schemes. India’s two biggest challenges, jobs and agriculture, are not just of the past five years but long running sagas. Both are serious, exacerbated by decades of poor policies. India missed the bus in earlier decades, while many Asian nations bootstrapped themselves out of poverty with high economic growth rates. Now, when India has become the world's fastest growing large economy, radical new technologies are ensuring that far fewer jobs are created than earlier.
Similarly India's agriculture policies, devised for 1960s food shortage crises, solved that problem but are now themselves the source of huge new problems. Over the decades, the minimum support price (MSP) induced and made possible farmers' heroic production of grains, eradicating shortages. It continues to do so now, even though there is vast surplus production of grains, a lot of which rots in godowns or gets consumed by rats. Thus, governments have gradually become miserly with MSP, giving the opposition ammunition to target their heartlessness. This saga keeps playing in a continual loop, irrespective of which parties are in government and opposition. Clearly, a better solution than MSP must be found. But dumping or restricting MSP until that happens will only increase farmers' misery manifold.