Bhubaneswar: Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s Nyuntam Aay Yojana promise for the downtrodden seems to have been inspired by an idea Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and his own great grandfather, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, had espoused some 80 years ago, says a report in Deccan Herald.
It was Bose’s initiative, when he was Congress president in 1938, to form a National Planning Commission under Nehru, with the “aim to ensure adequate standard of living for the masses”.
Rahul’s proposed Minimum Income Guarantee Scheme wants to ensure that every poor household gets an annual income of Rs 72,000, while Nehru had suggested the need for Rs 216-300 as minimum income in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
The panel was formed by Bose as he was not convinced with Mahatma Gandhi’s economic philosophy and wanted an emphasis on industrialisation, a view echoed by Nehru, the report further said. But the committee could not finish its work, as leaders like Nehru and others were arrested during the Quit India movement.
