The National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme not only provides a stable economic base to households but is also directing capital investment to rural areas and creating valuable assets that are changing the rural landscape. Following are some of the highlights::
* The guarantee of 100 days of wage employment
* The programme has enabled children to go to school, improved nutrition within the family, increased wages, reduced indebtedness and migration and significantly, even empowered the poor.
* Asset Creation::
- Lands transformed into productive farming units
- water tables have risen in “backward” districts
- drinking water wells save time and effort of women
- water-harvesting structures, minor irrigation tanks, community wells, land development, flood control, plantations and so on.
- Contrary to construction of roads which are washed away with each monsoon.
* This is also of special relevance today with greater concern for water, global warming and climate change.
* If sustained over the years, will have a visible impact on the landscape of rural India.
* The poor possess more than 15 million hectares of land — government assigned, ceiling surplus and bhoodan, as recorded tenants, lands restored to tribal communities. At present, these lands are often left fallow or produce one crop with a low yield. Such lands invariably have no source of irrigation, are away from the village and are undeveloped. But they share an important feature — they are invariably in compact blocks and are therefore suitable for integrated development packages. These holdings could therefore be transformed into productive farming units, often with irrigation from wells, tanks, other water harvesting structures, lift irrigation schemes.
* This can be extended to watershed development, drinking water, agriculture, horticulture, farming systems, fisheries, handlooms, handicrafts — each can synergise with the employment guarantee, enhance production from rural areas ...
There has been an aggressive urgency in attracting overseas capital to India; can a similar concern also be shown for a programme of capital investment that we ourselves have initiated, and one which has great potential and meaning for the nation’s development?
Complete Article @ http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/05/04/stories/2008050450010100.htm
A retired civil servant, the author is a former Director General of the National Institute of Rural Development, Hyderabad, Ministry of Rural Development, Govt of India.Email: lalitmathur45@yahoo.com
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