You'd have to be generating quite a bit of tax revenue to do UBI. Aren't a significant number of Indians very poor? How do they plan to pull this off?
It’s a scam, where is this money coming from?
They find oil somewhere?
India has the 6th largest economy in the world at $3 trillion a year. If you go by PPP its even bigger at $11 trillion. And it's the fastest-growing economy in the world. Their government is pulling $330 billion of revenue a year. And the economy has mostly been helping the rich - they have just as many billionaires as America (535) and nearly 1,000,000 millionaires.
There's a ton of poor people in India, but you also have to remember that securing a basic income wouldn't take a ton of money per person there. Imagine, for instance, that they guarantee $175 per person per year and 300 million people qualify. That would require $50 billion a year - that's only 15% of the budget. It's definitely doable. You would phase out other welfare programs to concentrate on this more direct, more efficient one, you would increase taxes on the ultra-rich, and you would see a boost in the economy overall because you'd be pumping so much money into the poorest sector which would then immediately spend it.
And $175/person isn't a ton of money but if each person in the family got it then it could cover all poverty-level expenses. No one would be forced to go without food anymore, and people who already were getting a poverty-level income would now have enough to start getting ahead. People would still work in an attempt to get out of poverty, but they wouldn't go without the basics anymore.
offer free money to an implicitly labeled "untouchable" class, to eradicate poverty and hunger brehs
You're going a bit off of old stereotypes - most poverty is by people other than Dalits. They still have the most relative poverty but it's a much bigger problem than that - there are rich Dalits and there are poor upper-class people.
Most of these untouchable are illiterate, how are they voting?
Yes, they do vote by picture. Imagine if "Elephant" and "Donkey" were as well-known as "Republican" and "Democrat". Congress's symbol is a hand and BJP's symbol is the lotus flower - other major parties are represented by a bicycle, elephant, broom, etc. Poor people would know the symbol as well as they know the name.
Modi's coalition has been polling worse the last couple months with polls showing a hung parliament.
Gandhi still got time to make up ground... gotta go for broke
It would be surprising considering what a train wreck Congress has been since 2011....but the mood does seem to be shifting, so we'll see.
that's a bigger lie than "mexico will pay for the wall"
that ship has sailed