Poverty Alleviation in Rural India: Programmes and Strategy
Poverty eradication is one of the major objectives of planned development. The magnitude of the problem is still quite staggering. Thirty six per cent of the Indian population was below poverty line (BPL) in 1993-94, the latest year for which the data are available and the absolute number of poor was 320 million, out of which 244 million (37 per cent of the rural population) lived in rural areas. The incidence of poverty declined from 54.9 per cent in 1973-74 to 36 percent in 1993-94. But the absolute number of poor did not decline much over this period of 20 years. There were 321 million poor in 1973-74 and 320 million in 1993-94; in the rural areas the corresponding numbers were 261 million and 244 million.
The main determinants of poverty are
(i) Lack of income and purchasing power attributable to lack of productive employment and considerable underemployment and not to lack of employment per se;
(ii) A continuous increase in the price of food, especially foodgrains which account for 70-80 per cent of the consumption basket; and
(iii) Inadequacy of social infrastructure, affecting the quality of life of the people and their employability.
Economic growth is important. Economic growth creates more resources and has the potential of creating more space for the involvement of the poor. But the involvement of the poor depends on the sources of growth and the nature of growth. If the growth is sourced upon those sectors of the economy or those activities that have a natural tendency to involve the poor in their expansion, such growth helps poverty eradication. Therefore, it is important to source a large part of economic growth in agriculture, in rural non-agricultural activities and in productive expansion of the informal sector which all have high employment elasticities, as well as in an export strategy based on labour intensive exports.
The Government recognizes that high growth of incomes is by itself not enough to improve the quality of life of the poor. Unless all the citizens of the country, and most particularly the poor, have certain basic minimum services, their living conditions cannot improve. These minimum services include among other things literacy education, primary health care, safe drinking water and nutritional security. The Government had convened a meeting of Chief Ministers to identify such basic minimum services and a list of seven services had unanimously been agreed upon. These seven services are safe drinking water, primary health facilities, universal primary education, nutrition to school and pre- school children, shelter for the poor, road connectivity for all villages and habitations, and the Public Distribution System (PDS) with a focus on the poor.
The Ninth Plan lays special emphasis on these seven basic minimum services and will make all efforts to achieve a minimum level of satisfaction in providing these in partnership with the State Governments and the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs).
Direct poverty alleviation programmes are important and will continue on an expanded scale in the Ninth Plan. But these programmes would be oriented towards strengthening the productive potential of the economy and providing more opportunities for involving the poor in the economic process.
Broadly, there would be schemes for income generation through supplementary employment, for the welfare of the poor in rural/urban areas and for a targeted PDS system to ensure that the poor have access to foodgrains at prices they can afford. In this chapter, both rural and urban poverty alleviation programmes besides the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) will be discussed in some detail.
Poverty can effectively be eradicated only when the poor start contributing to the growth by their active involvement in the growth process. Implementation of the programmes should be increasingly based on approaches and methods that involve the poor themselves in the process of poverty eradication and economic growth.
This is possible through a process of social mobilisation, encouraging participatory approaches and institutions and empowerment of the poor. In this the PRIs, the voluntary organisations and community based Self-Help Groups will be more closely involved.
URL – http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/9th/vol2/v2c2-3.htm