In September of 2017, as India was overtaking France to become the sixth largest economy in the word,11-year-old Santoshi died of starvation. Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s Minimum Income Guarantee plan would not only banish chronic hunger from India, it could raise family incomes by as much as Rs 30,000 a year at the bottom of the pyramid.

The Congress led UPA had made history after bringing in MGNREGA, which was called the “largest and most ambitious social security and public works programme in the world” and a “stellar example of rural development” by the World Bank in its World Development Report 2014. Rahul Gandhi’s Minimum Income Guarantee plan could well be the world’s largest income support programme.

As we wait for the Congress to put out the numbers and the contours of the plan in its manifesto, the Minimum Income Guarantee plan effectively reverses Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trickle-down economics and replaces it with bottom-up growth.

While implementing the scheme would conceivably create short-term problems, it could fundamentally alter India’s growth trajectory, much like Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, which not only allowed the United States to recover from the Great Depression but also laid the foundations of strong economic growth in the years that followed.

Rahul Gandhi’s plan Minimum Income Guarantee has put the ruling BJP off-balance, but the impact of the scheme would go way beyond politics, it would transform the fundamentals of the economy.

While the Congress will reveal the specifics of the plan over the next few months, as the campaign for the 2019 Lok Sabha election gathers momentum, data from the 2016-17 Economic Survey indicate what the pay-out could be like, the plan’s likely impact and more importantly, how the plan could be funded.