what level schemes fail.
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Employment schemes fail to ease rural poverty
The government's employment generation schemes, laudable though they may be, have yet to achieve their goals. Not involving intended beneficiaries is cited as a major reason for their failure.
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By Shailendra Kumar, Amit Mitra
Published: Sunday 07 June 2015
Employment schemes fail to ease rural poverty
Brick-laying under the JRY sch (Credit: Amar Talwar / cse)THE MUCH-lauded Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (JRY) has failed as an instrument to transform rural India. And not all the high praise from the prime minister or the government's hiking of the JRY budget or the speedy enactment of the Panchayati Raj bill, ostensibly to empower village-level institutions, can mask this reality.
Employment schemes such as JRY are deemed necessary because the bulk -- nearly 80 per cent -- of unemployment is in rural India. JRY was formed by merging the National Rural Employment Programme (NREP) and the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP).
The government insists JRY and the Panchayati Raj bill will strengthen the political base of the poor, but Planning Commission member Jayant Patil is sceptical. "The new panchayats will not necessarily be people-oriented because the political system does not encourage participatory development," says Patil, who emphasises micro-planning and people's participation are essential. "JRY funds should be used to build protective irrigation systems that can change the face of a village," he adds.
The Planning Commission's publication, JRY -- A Quick Study (1991-92), says only 874.56 million persondays of employment were generated against a target of 929.10 million persondays. This year's employment target is 1.1 billion persondays. Nevertheless, the hopes of 300 million rural poor in the country have been belied, because JRY has failed to empower village-level institutions and generate employment through people's participation.
Theoretically, JRY is intended to curb corruption, encourage accountability of public funds and empower people to guide their collective destiny. But even the government's intention to bypass the bureaucracy, which had been accused of siphoning money from the NREP and RLEGP and of executing unproductive schemes, has not been attained.
In principle, the government has devolved power and funds to panchayats, but in practice, most JRY schemes are still regulated from Delhi. The irony is that JRY -- a piece of election largesse of the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, continues to follow a top-down model. Says Indrapal Singh, sarpanch of Sonrai in Lalitpur district in UP, "What our village needs is water, but we cannot spend JRY money on dugwells because the administration has banned it due to a 5-m drop in the water table"