Basic Income for the Arts

Big news for the creative world — and something India could truly take inspiration from. 🌞🎨

Ireland has just made its Basic Income for the Arts permanent!

Artists, writers, musicians, and performers will now receive around €325 a week (~₹1.25 lakh/month or $1,500) a steady income that lets them focus on creating rather than merely surviving.

The initiative began as a 3-year pilot in 2022 with about 2,000 participants, and it worked so well that it’s now here to stay. The Irish government calls it “an Investment in Imagination.”

And rightly so. Because when creativity isn’t suffocated by rent or bills, it begins to pay attention to truth, to culture, to beauty, to everything that makes us human.

As all societies grapple with the growing threats that AI poses to jobs and livelihoods, many policymakers and researchers will now be watching Ireland’s bold experiment closely.

One reason Ireland has managed to break through global hesitation around such policies is its strong public support not just from artists, but from citizens at large. The roots of this support go back to the COVID-19 lockdowns, when the value of art, culture, and shared imagination became undeniable, and furlough programmes helped people survive sudden job losses.

This could be a defining model for how societies choose to value creativity. Imagine if India took a step like this treating art not as a luxury, but as a public good.

If creative people had the time and stability to simply create, what wonders might emerge?

Read more here