New Delhi: As the campaigning for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls is in the full swing, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday said that the promise of minimum income guarantee is Congress’ ‘surgical strike on poverty’ that will ensure there is no poor in the country after 2019.
While addressing a rally in Rajasthan’s Ganganagar, Gandhi said the Congress’s promise of minimum income guarantee is “an explosion”.
“It will set off a bomb… This is Congress’s surgical strike on poverty. They (the BJP) tried to eliminate the poor. We will eliminate poverty,” Gandhi said.
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Rahul Gandhi further launched an attack on PM Modi led government alleging that the current regime has brought back people who were uplifted from the below poverty line by the Congress-led UPA rule.
“The fact that 25 crore people are living in poverty in the 21st century India is a shame,” Gandhi said.
The Congress president said nowhere such a scheme has ever been implemented. “There should not be a single poor person in the country,” he said addressing the Congress’s Jan Sankalp Rally at Suratgarh in Ganganagar district.
Congress on Monday promised that his party would, if it comes to power, guarantee an income of at least Rs 12,000 a month for 20% of India’s poorest families by giving them Rs 6,000 a month.
The scheme, if implemented, is expected to cost Rs 3.6 lakh crore, around 2% of India’s GDP.