A Note on Rural Development in India
Poverty in Rural India
At the beginning of 2000, it has been estimated that
approximately one-third of the world's poor live in India, and there
are more poor people in India alone than in the whole of Sub-Saharan
Africa. According to the estimates of the internationally recognized
poverty line of one dollar a day, 44% of persons in India are poor,
and 86% of people earn less than $2 a day. Indian poverty is
predominantly rural: 75 per cent of the country’s poor live in
rural areas where landless households, Scheduled Castes and Tribes,
women and female-headed households, old people, and female children
face more deprivation than others (Saxena and Farrington 2003).
Poverty is an extremely complex phenomenon that
manifests itself in a range of overlapping and interwoven economic,
political and social deprivations. These include mainly lack of
assets (primarily land), low-income levels, hunger, poor health or
malnutrition, insecurity, physical and psychological hardship, social
exclusion, degradation and discrimination, and political
powerlessness and disarticulation. The data, released by the
Government of India (2000), shows that 42 per cent of the rural poor
fall into the most economically disadvantaged group of agricultural
labour. 32 per cent of them undertake agricultural cultivation using
their own labour. They hardly enjoy the few resources (natural
resources, schooling, power connections, health facilities, etc.)
available in the villages. Their children are severely malnourished
and the nutritional status is alarming. Furthermore, more than half
of this group consists of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SCs
and STs). Overall, SCs and STs constitute about 22% of the rural
population but account for more than 42% of the poor. Within the poor
rural households, women, cutting across caste lines, are
significantly more disadvantaged than men and suffer much more.
Thus, multiple deprivations linked to poverty are a
deeply rooted reality in the countryside, and any comprehensive
effort to reduce poverty must confront that reality and its
consequences. The realities are visible in the segregated hamlets
where many of the poor households live on the fringes of rural
villages. The village situation also makes them unable to avail
community services – schools, health centres, public hand pumps,
and shops that distribute subsidised grains – which are in
principle meant to assist the poor.
Land Holding and Land Use
Rural
poverty has largely been shaped by the unequal and skewed
distribution of natural and state generated resources, primarily land
and employment opportunities, among people. Sickening inequities
vis-à-vis land ownership in rural India have continued since
independence in spite of the various land reform measures by
government to bring about a more even distribution of holdings. On
the basis of NSS data, Chadha (1994), by clubbing the households
owning no
land with those owning only homestead land but no arable land into
one class, finds that functional landlessness has increased in
relative terms since 1953-54 in most states, particularly in
agriculturally progressive states. In between 1961-62 to 1982, the
proportion of such landless households in rural India has increased
from 28 per cent to 43 per cent. This finding makes it clear that the
programme of land reforms has failed in most of the states, and the
transactions of land in the by and large uncontrolled market has
added to the share of landless rural households.
This apart, as the data shows, the number of
small/marginal owners has increased over the years along with the
area they owned and the average size of their holdings. This is
primarily because of the population pressure on land and the breaking
up of the households owning large farming land. Though the proportion
of families owning large tracts of land has declined, they still own
a substantial portion of the land in most of the states.
The NSS data also shows that the share of households
owning but not operating any land in rural India has remained
constant at around 17 per cent over 1961-62 to 1982. However, It can
be a misnomer to refer to this group as a ‘rentier class’ as it
includes, apart from absentee landowners, households owning very
small holdings but leasing them out in order to work as wage
labourers in or outside agriculture. There is a considerable
proportion of households who neither own nor operate land. Almost all
of them constitute the class of agricultural labour households. The
absolute number and proportion of this class have increased over time
practically everywhere, partly owing to population increase and
partly owing to downward mobility. There is a high correspondence
between this group of households and the incidence of rural poverty
In such a situation, one would expect the distribution
of operational holdings to be less skewed than ownership holdings, on
the assumption that larger owners generally rent land to smaller
ones. While this is true in theory, ground reality in rural India is
more complex, and landlords and tenants cannot be divided into
mutually exclusive classes (see Neale 1990, Sahay 2001). In rural
India, there is growing trend that many with relatively large
operational holdings lease-in land from smaller owners (the
phenomenon of so-called ‘reverse tenancy’). In the area where
there has been rapid mechanization and commercialisation of
agriculture, such as Haryana and Punjab, this trend is more dominant.
This trend or the concentration of operational holdings in the hands
of land holding class is functionally related with the displacement
of tenants and increase in hired labour. This situation has further
increased inequality in rural India.
Some significant studies also draw our attention to the
fact that households owning/operating even tiny holdings are
significantly less likely to experience absolute poverty. A land
base, however small, is argued to offer some security, collateral,
and opportunities to increase incomes through livestock production or
other land-based activities (see Agarwal 1994, Lipton 1985). That is
why, the incidence of chronic poverty among landless farm labourers
is still much higher than among average landed persons.
The
State of Employment and Rural Vulnerability
The
state of employment in rural India is also quite distressing for the
poor. Out of the total rural workers, 60 per cent (238 million) are
employed in agricultural sector and 33 per cent (133 million) in the
unorganised non-agricultural sector, whereas only 7 per cent (28
million) are employed in organized sector. This apart, the changing
composition of employment is also making the life of rural poor
worse. While self-employment is on the decline, casual employment is
on the rise. The share of self-employed in the rural workforce
declined from 62% in 1977–8 to 56% in 1999–2000, while the
proportion of casual labour increased from 30% to 37%. Regular
employment declined from 7.8% to 6.7% during the same period
(Radhakrishna, 2002). The proportion of rural households receiving
incomes from cultivation fell from 62.4% in 1987–8 to 57.1% in
1999–2000. The government data shows that in the 1990s higher GDP
growth rates were accompanied by a decline in growth of rural
employment. In fact, rural employment has fallen in absolute terms
too.
Programmes
for Poverty Reduction in Rural India
Alleviating the bane of mass poverty in rural India was
one of the major goals set for the nation when we embarked on our
planned development effort more than five decades ago (Dreze and Sen
2002). What followed was a series of efforts to formulate and
implement a set of different policies and programmes by central as
well as state governments to achieve this goal. Over the years, rural
poverty alleviation programmes of various types and the annual plan
provisions have been expanding in size and today there is a wide
variety of such programmes absorbing a large volume of resources. The
annual Plan provision in 2002–3 for Centrally Sponsored Schemes in
rural development is Rs180bn, for food subsidy Rs240bn, and for
fertiliser subsidy about Rs110bn, making a total of Rs530bn. But the
fact remains that, even as we have launched the Tenth Five Year Plan
starting from 2002 and prepare ourselves to take on the challenges of
the new millennium, poverty and deprivation continue to plague rural
India.
The programmes, despite their good intentions, did not
succeed in eliminating poverty and deprivation from rural India for
various reasons (Dandekar and Rath 1971, Rao 1990). Most of these
programmes were beset with problems like corruption, leakage of
resources to non-poor, lack of integration across sectors to create a
better impact and giving too much emphasis on time bound target
achievement of households (Rath 1990). Further, the adoption of a
top-down approach and lack of people’s participation in the
planning and implementation of the developmental programmes were
identified as the other factors responsible for the inability and
ineffectiveness of the direct attack programmes to bring about
significant reduction in the poverty (Oklay et. al 1991).
Recently, efforts have been made to overcome some of the
problems of the top-down approach for poverty alleviation and to
enable the people to participate more actively in the implementation
of the developmental programmes. Strengthening and streamlining of
Panchayati Raj institutions by way of the 73rd Constitutional
Amendment, and co-opting the institution of civil society such as
non-governmental organizations in implementing various developmental
programmes were some of the steps taken to improve peoples’
participation and effectiveness of the poverty alleviation
programmes. Overall, thus the state has been the major actor for
taking initiatives to tackle the problems of poverty and deprivation.
