Lok Sabha Election 2019: the Congress NYAY promise of Rs 72,000 a year, and the problem of measuring household income

On 25 March 2019, a fortnight before the Lok Sabha election, Congress president Rahul Gandhi announced the party’s main campaign promise: NYAY (Nyuntam Aay Yojana), a minimum income guarantee for the poorest households in the country.

What was promised

Under the plan, the poorest 20 per cent of households, which the party put at about five crore families or 25 crore people, would receive Rs 6,000 a month, or Rs 72,000 a year, paid directly into their accounts. The party described it as a way of ensuring that no family’s income fell below a floor of about Rs 12,000 a month. At Rs 72,000 for each of five crore families, the transfer alone would cost about Rs 3.6 lakh crore a year; the party said it would be phased in and that the fiscal room existed.

The difficulty: whose income?

The objection raised most often by economists was not the cost but the targeting. India does not collect reliable household income data at the national level. Official poverty estimates, from the Tendulkar and Rangarajan committees, are based on what households spend, not what they earn, and welfare schemes generally identify beneficiaries through the Socio-Economic and Caste Census rather than income. Self-reported income is known to be understated. Supporters of the scheme countered that existing surveys and databases were good enough to build a list of the poorest families.

The government rejected the idea as an election gimmick. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley dismissed it as a bluff, and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad recalled Indira Gandhi’s 1971 promise to remove poverty.

What happened next

The Congress won 52 seats in the 2019 election, against the BJP‘s 303, and NYAY was never implemented. The debate it started did not end there: direct cash transfers to households, and especially to women, became a staple of state election campaigns in the years that followed.

See also: upcoming elections on India Vote Kar.

Originally published on 26 March 2019. Rewritten on 9 October 2026, with the background and what happened next added.

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