Picture of neglect

The single biggest take-away from the first set of data from the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) is this: the impact of half a century of planned development or targeted poverty alleviation measures, and over two decades of market-led growth in the post-reform period, has hardly been felt in rural India. Rural India still presents a stark picture of poverty and deprivation. For the first time, deprivation has been sought to be measured in other than purely economic terms. As many as 14 attributes were considered to indicate some form of deprivation, including households with no earning adults, households with handicapped members, and others where working age adults are illiterate. Together, they show a ruralIndia which, in relative economic terms, has hardly changed since Independence. More than half of all rural households are landless, and 51 per cent of all rural households depend on manual labour for livelihood. In over 90 per cent of households, the principal wage-earner earns less than ₹10,000 per month; in 74 per cent of rural households, the highest-earning member earns less than ₹5,000 a month, which works out to less than the newly mandated national minimum wage floor of ₹160 per day. The nature of the rural economy is still predominantly agrarian, with just one in 10 households having a wage-earner with a salaried job. The picture on the education and skilling front is even more stark: Less than 10 per cent of rural residents have crossed higher secondary, and just 3.4 per cent of rural households have a graduate as a family member. These numbers get worse lower down in the caste order — scheduled caste households fare worse than other castes, and scheduled tribe households lag further.

Measuring things is the first step in getting things done. By that yardstick, the SECC has clearly outlined the task ahead, not just for the Centre, but the States as well. In fact, the pressure on States to deliver on governance is higher, what with the Modi government pushing its model of competitive federalism and devolution of fiscal power to States. On its part, the Centre has said it will use the SECC data in its ‘Mission Antyodaya’ to address rural poverty through a Gram Panchayat Poverty Reduction Plan. This is a welcome move, but, as the Census findings so clearly demonstrate, merely having a plan is not enough. Unless execution capacity is developed, and adequate auditing of outcomes is done, this plan, too, is likely to go the way of all the plans that have preceded it.

What the SECC findings demonstrate is the need to rethink our approach to poverty alleviation and rural development. Going forward, policymakers need to focus on the rural economy as a whole, instead of narrowly targeting sub-sections, and look for ways to develop rural businesses and skills in tandem, so that to begin with, at least the dependence on subsistence-wage manual labour is reduced.

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