Earlier this month, two community-led UK Basic Income trials were announced. The proposal, championed by progressive think-tank Autonomy, follows two years of consultation with the respective local communities in Jarrow and in Grange, East Finchley.
The trial will see 15 people in each area receive an unconditional £1600 monthly payment for a period of two years, and factoring in researchers, admin, along with hourly rate payments to an otherwise unpaid evaluation control group, the whole scheme will cost a little over £1.5 million. Autonomy are still seeking full funding for the plan.
In Scotland, the government supported proposals for trials in several cities in 2021, but without primary legislation from Westminster were unable to proceed.
In Wales last year a fully-funded pilot Government scheme, designed so as not to require UK approval, gave £1600 pm to 500 young adults leaving the care system. The two year trial includes extensive evaluation and research.
This article will expand with further interviews and news, but we start with a new edit of an earlier Real Media interview with Sarath Davala , a trained sociologist and NGO worker, who was the co-ordinator of the India Network for Basic Income.
Sarath had been working with the 2 million-strong Self-Employed Women’s Association, and saw first-hand how union organisers had to assess and advise on a complex bureaucratic system of benefits and entitlements for workers in the informal sector.
So the idea developed to trial a system of what they called unconditional cash transfers – basic income by another name. For 12 to 18 months, 6,000 individuals across eight caste villages and 1 tribal village were given regular direct money transfers, while researchers tracked 100 families against control groups in another 9 similar villages.
At first around 8% of the recipients – some rich families/landowners – withdrew from the project, concerned that it may be some sort of trick, but when new women’s groups started meeting in the villages for discussions and skill-training, the richer women were intrigued and wanted to join, and soon, the men followed.
Obviously, the scheme greatly benefited marginalised people, but the study showed universal rewards such as a remarkable improvement in female nutrition, and a strengthening of community identity.
India has a complex and wasteful benefits system. It’s estimated that for every four dollars the government spends, less than one dollar ends up in the hands of the beneficiary. There is also a massive public food distribution system costing tens of billions of dollars each year delivering subsidised wheat and rice to around three-quarters of the rural communities and half those living in cities, but again there are ‘leakages’ of around 40% in the system.
Farmers in India have faced years of falling wages, and small farmers battle to survive against corporate industrial agriculture, leading to a huge rise in suicides.
Planetary boundaries, climate and ecological breakdown and also the likelihood of fewer jobs as a potential effect of Artificial Intelligence, all point to a global issue – we cannot continue with the existing economic fixation on growth, and so maybe a form of universal income would help sustain much-needed small agriculture and a different way of life.
