‘We will remonetise what Modi demonetised’

Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said the “NYAY” (Nyuntam Aay Yojana) scheme will remonetise what Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonetised and asserted that his party’s anti-poverty programme has thrown the BJP into total disarray

“What the PM has done over the past five years is to remove all money from the economy with failed policies such as demonetisation and a poorly executed ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’ (GST). Informal sectors have been badly hit. The aim of the NYAY scheme is two-fold. First is to guarantee a minimum income to the bottom 20 per cent families. The second is to remonetise the economy,” Rahul said.

“He (Modi) has taken away from the farmers, snatched from the small and medium businesses, he’s taken away from the unemployed youth, extinguished the savings of mothers and sisters of this country. We want to return to India’s deprived sections what Modiji has snatched from them,” he added.

Asked about apprehensions of some economists that NYAY, which entails an expenditure of ₹3.6 lakh crore annually, could aggravate India’s fiscal deficit position, Rahul said the Congress consulted a large number of economists and experts, studied numerous papers and other research material on this subject and ran an extensive financial modelling exercise before deciding to include the plan in its Lok Sabha manifesto. To a question on the scheme being prima facie populist, Rahul said: “It is not a populist measure as projected by some critics.”

“Is it only the crony capitalist friends of Mr Modi who are to benefit from government schemes? I’m only asking for fairness, for justice, or nyay for India’s poor. There’s nothing populist about that,” he countered.

The Congress President did not give a time line on when the party planned to make India poverty free and said NYAY will first be tested through a pilot to “smoothen out any flaws.”

Asked if the pilot will be run in Congress-ruled States, Rahul said experts will decide on that.

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