Quasi-Universal Basic Rural Income(QUBRI) provides an excellent opportunity to chart out a comprehensive plan on a real social safety net for rural India. Elaborate (200 Words)
Refer - Business Standard
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 5 years
KEY POINTS
Salient Features
· QURBI is an alternative to build a new rural India where a basic income, regardless of agricultural vagaries, will be guaranteed.
· The transfer would not cover all rural households but all except the demonstrably well-off based on the rural Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC).
· QUBRI would be progressive and cover all the deserving poor as Odisha’s Kalia scheme does but would go further in including non-farm, rural households.
· The QUBRI would use the SECC not to target and include beneficiaries but to exclude non-beneficiaries, those that, by way of owning certain assets, are clearly non-poor.
· Cash transfers would be sent to the remaining rural households. Many or most of these have bank accounts (which are being used for transfers of pensions and MNREGA payments).
Mopping up the financial resources
· The central government, at the appropriate time, should convene a meeting of all the states to discuss QUBRI because it must be discussed, financed and implemented within a cooperative federalism framework.
· The central government, at the appropriate time, should convene a meeting of all the states to discuss QUBRI because it must be discussed, financed and implemented within a cooperative federalism framework.
· QUBRI must involve fair burden sharing between the Center and the states.
But QUBRI should not be financed:
· from RBI resources not least because they are one-time and cannot finance a permanent QUBRI entitlement;
· by the states or center breaching their existing fiscal commitments.
The correct way to think about QUBRI is as help to rural India instead of and replacing other interventions such as loan waivers, and Rythu Bandhu and Kalia, and ideally, also the fertiliser, interest, power and water subsidies whose benefit/cost ratios have been non-compelling.
