benefits and reduces the bureaucratic process involved in taking unemployment, sickness and other assistance benefits.

The Nordic country is currently collating database of 2,000 unemployed people who are paid tax-free €560 each a month under a two-year universal basic income experiment started in January.

The results of the basic income experiment in Finland, a country providing over 40 types of social security benefits to its citizens, could offer insights for India on how to design such a scheme and who should be provided basic income. Kangas said the goal of Finland’s basic income experiment is “to obtain information on the effects of basic income on the employment of persons participating in the experiment, and to survey other impacts of basic income”.

The Finland government has allocated €20 million for the experimenton 2,000 persons aged 25-63 years, who were chosen through a nationwide random selection roughly representative of the nation. In India, the Economic Survey 2016-17 has flagged the Universal Basic Income (UBI) scheme as “a conceptually appealing idea” that could work as an alternative to the various social welfare programmes that are targeted at reducing poverty.

There were a number of implementation challenges, especially the risk that it would become an add-on to, rather than a replacement of, current anti-poverty and social programmes, which would make it fiscally unaffordable, the survey noted. Apart from Finland, India did a similar pilot on basic incomes in two villages of Madhya Pradesh in 2010. Among the developed countries, Switzerland has rejected a proposal in a referendum to provide universal basic income.

Even though