A day after Congress president Rahul Gandhi announced his ambitious minimum income guarantee scheme, the party on Tuesday said the beneficiary of the scheme’s financial assistance will directly go to the woman member of the family.
The party sought to clear “confusion” over the scheme with party chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala saying that the scheme will directly benefit 20 per cent beneficiary families and that scheme is “women centric”.
Surjewala said the Nyunatam Aay Yojana (Nyay) is not a “top-up scheme” and is a women-centric scheme whereby the money will go directly into the bank accounts of the woman member of a family.
At the same time, Congress asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP to clearly spell out whether they support its proposal to give Rs 72,000 annually to five crore poor families under a minimum income guarantee scheme, claiming many BJP Ministers were opposing the idea.
Party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi took to Twitter to applaud Rahul Gandhi’s announcement and said the best aspect of the Nyay is it will provide women with steady money. “What’s making me most happy is that the NYAY scheme will add Rs 72,000 every year in the bank accounts of women,” she tweeted
“The Congress will get this amount credited to the bank accounts of the women of beneficiary families. This scheme will be implemented without any discrimination between the urban and rural areas. It will be implemented across the country uniformly,” Surjewala said.
Rahul on Monday announced that Rs 72,000 per year will be given as minimum income to poor families if his party is voted to power in Lok Sabha polls. Asserting that it will be the final assault on poverty, he said the scheme would benefit around 25 crore people.
Congress also attacked Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for dubbing the scheme as a “bluff announcement”, saying no other political party has “betrayed” India for more than seven decades in the name of poverty. Surjewala also attacked Government think tank NITI Aayog vice chairman Rajiv Kumar dubbing the body he headed as “Rajneeti Ayog” and asked him to run the organisation from the BJP office and contest elections instead.
Actor-politician Shatrughan Sinha — who is all set to quit the BJP will join the Congress in Bihar on Thursday, showered praise on Rahul Gandhi, calling him the “master of situation” and his proposed scheme a “masterstroke”.