‘We already have quasi universal income’: What the rise of cash transfers mean for the ‘India story’

Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal.

Few policy tools have captured the imagination of India’s politicians and voters as cash transfers. From Modi to Mamata, every government in India is falling over itself to hand out money. Even though the actual sums are quite modest, this represents a stark welfare choice for the world’s largest country. It seems that the Indian state has moved away from a state’s classical job of building human capital by funding public goods such education and health and decided that handing out (rather modest) sums of cash will do the job – or at least that’s the best it can do.

The fact that this also ties in with a global debate on universal basic income – an unconditional cash transfer from governments to citizens – makes the ideas and arguments around India’s cash transfer regime fascinating.

To unpack this, on the India Fix this week, I interviewed Yamini Aiyar. Former president of the Centre of Policy Research in Delhi and currently a visiting fellow at Brown University in the United States, few people understand this subject better than Aiyar.

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