With the right momentum, the project can help transform rural India – in terms of development and social justice
With the right momentum, the project can help transform rural India – in terms of development and social justice
The Indian Constitution mandates local governments to prepare and implement plans for ‘economic development and social justice’ (Articles 243G and 243W). Several complementary institutions and measures such as Gram Sabhas to facilitate people’s participation, District Planning Committees (DPCs) to prepare bottom-up and spatial development plans, State Finance Commissions (SFCs) to ensure vertical and horizontal equity, To promote this target for one-third reservation was introduced for women (in most states, now 50%), population-based representation for SC/ST communities, and so on. Yet, India’s decentralization reforms (with no parallel in federal history) have failed to advance the decentralization process in providing social justice and progress in rural India.
The article argues that given the right momentum, the Government of India’s ‘Mission Antyodaya’ project was launched in 2017-18 (and in a convergence framework to eradicate poverty in its many dimensions among rural households). cast) has great promise to revive. The aims of these great democratic reforms. The Ministry of Panchayati Raj and the Ministry of Rural Development act as nodal agents to take the mission forward.
The Bharatiya Janata Party government, which came to power in 2014, had many reasons to re-imagine rural development. The traditional poverty line linked to the calorie-income measurement, which had been religiously adopted by the former Planning Commission with great academic support, proved useless and failed to serve as an objective policy tool.
Moreover, the disclosed data brought into the public domain by the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011 were ‘seeking’ remedial interventions. that 90% of rural households have no salaried jobs, 53.7 million households are landless, 6.89 million female-headed households have no adult members to support, 49% suffer from multiple deprivations, 51.4% physically casual labor of the 23.73 million who are illegal. living room or only one room, etc. Cannot be easily dismissed by any democratic government. Ironically, this has happened in a country that spends more than ₹3 trillion every year for the rural poor from the central and state budgets and Bank-Credit Linked Self Help Program, Indeed, the ‘Mission Antyodaya’ project was a necessary intervention.
main goal
The main objective of ‘Mission Antyodaya’ is to ensure optimum utilization of resources through convergence of various schemes that address the multiple deprivations of poverty, making the Gram Panchayat the center of the development plan. This planning process (whose intellectual heritage is linked to the people’s plan of Kerala) is supported by an annual survey that collects data on 29 subjects assigned to panchayats by the Eleventh Schedule, at various development intervals at the gram panchayat level. helps to assess. of the Constitution.
These subjects are divided into 112 parameters for data collection using detailed questionnaires. Also, data related to health and nutrition, social security, good governance, water management etc. is also collected. The Ministry of Panchayati Raj’s idea of identifying gaps in basic needs at the local level and integrating resources of various schemes, SHGs, voluntary organizations, etc. requires a high level of coordination and capacity building to finance them. . , If pursued in a real way, it can promote economic growth and inter-judicial equality. Although two major reports, one on infrastructure and service gaps and the other on the composite index, have been in the public domain, they do not seem to attract public discussion.
flaws in gram panchayats
The ‘Mission Antyodaya’ survey in 2019-20, for the first time, collected data highlighting infrastructure gaps from 2.67 lakh gram panchayats, covering 6.48 lakh villages with a population of 1.03 billion. Enables a yearly updated data set Development planning from the village level to the state and regionally and spatially throughout the country, For insight into the gap report, we can use the state-wise break-up of the score-values. The assigned maximum score values will be added up to 100 and presented in class intervals of 10. While no state in India falls in the top score bracket of 90 to 100, 1,484 gram panchayats fall in the bottom bracket. Even 10 states and all union territories do not appear in the score range of 80 to 90. The total number of gram panchayats for all the 18 reported states is only 260, which is only 0.10% of the total 2,67,466 gram panchayats in the country. If we consider the 70-80 score range to be a respectable achievement level, Kerala tops, but has only 34.69% of the state’s gram panchayats, as low as the corresponding all-India average of 1.09%. Even for Gujarat which comes after Kerala, the gram panchayats in this category are only 11.28%.
social justice still far away
Composite index data, a kind of surrogate for human development, is also not encouraging. Although only 15 gram panchayats in the country fall below the 10 mark, more than a fifth of gram panchayats in India are below the 40 mark. All gram panchayats in Kerala are above this and are different from the rest of the states. While the country as a whole has a composite index of only 7.37% in the 70-100 bracket, Gujarat (which tops the list) has 20.5%, followed by Kerala (19.77%) and Karnataka (17.68%). The Gap Report and the Composite Index show in unmistakable terms that building ‘economic growth and social justice’ remains a distant goal even after 30 years of decentralized reforms and nearly 75 years after independence.
Nearly four years have passed since former finance minister Arun Jaitley announced the mission project in his budget speech for 2017-18, with the specific goal of “making 50,000 gram panchayats poverty free by 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhiji”. Nothing happened, but the target positions have been shifted to 2022, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of independence, on 15 August. Goal post removal is a bad game.
fix these flaws
The scope for reducing the growing rural-urban inequalities is tremendous. Given the ‘Saturation Approach’ (100% target on select items) of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, the potential for realizing universal primary health care, literacy, drinking water supply and such other things is also immense. But no serious effort has been made to mobilize resources (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, National Rural Livelihood Mission, National Social Assistance Programme, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, etc.) and save on administrative expenses.
Another lapse is India’s failure to deploy data into fiscal federalism to improve the transfer system and horizontal equity in the delivery of public goods in India, particularly at the sub-state level. Clearly the Fifteenth Finance Commission has lapsed. The constitutional goal of planning and implementing economic development and social justice can be achieved only through strong policy interventions. India’s policy history has been witness to the failure to announce major projects and take them to their logical end. ‘Mission Antyodaya’ is a shocking case in recent times.
M.A. Oman is Honorary Fellow, Center for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram and Distinguished Fellow, Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation, Thiruvananthapuram