Somasekhar

Reduction of poverty has been an important issue before the nation since

independence. People living in the rural areas are facing three major problems.

These are upper backwardness, widespread unemployment and massive poverty;

Governments after governments have been promising to alleviate poverty through

five year plans. Ever since the inception of planning era “growth with equity and

social justice” has been the underlying key objective of development paradigm in

India. In the process of the developmental struggle the growth enhancing strategy

based on “trickle down” mechanism was accorded top priority for alleviation of

poverty.

The term poverty implies lack of development or under development. There is no

universally acceptable definition of poverty in spite of there are several commotions

and definitions in vogue. Poverty implies a condition of the characterized by

deprivation of some sort of the other and perceived as undesirable by the persons

concerned or others. It is a multidimensional concept and phenomenon. Generally

there is a consensus among scholars about poverty being concerned and defined as

a person’s lack of access to objectively determined reasonably adequate quantities

of goods and services to satisfy his/her material and non material basic needs.

Anti poverty programmes

Poverty alleviation would need a multi-pronged approach. But, the key element

is the provision of remunerative full employment. By remunerative we mean a

kind of employment, whether wage employment or self employment which is in

a position to provide above poverty line income to the employed. It was strongly

believed in the first Three Five Year Plans (1951-1966) that poverty could be

effectively tackled through general growth process and automatically trickle

down to poor masses. The benefits Agriculture development was placed on top

priority in the First Five Year Plan and shifted to industry in the next plan. During

this period, emphasis was also given on land reforms, communion development

and cooperative movements as a result of it progress has been made but not to

the desired extent. It was during the Fourth Five Year Plan that the focus shifted

from growth to the direct attack on poverty with a focus on reduction of poverty.

The rural poverty alleviation schemes which are now being implemented by the

Ministry of RuralAreas and Employment broadly can be grouped in two categories

viz. (1) wage employment schemes; (ii) self employment schemes.

In order to create more employment opportunities for unemployed and under

employed persons and improving rural infrastructure and community durable

assets, several employment generation programmes were launched since 1970s.

These progrmmes are crash scheme for Rural Employment (CSRE) in 1971, pilot

Intensive Rural Employment Programme (PIREP) in 1972, Marginal Farmers

and Agricultural Labour (MFALDA) in 1969, Small Farmers Development

416