Garibi Hatao, Now Out Of Silos

Women will now play a central role in the poverty eradication pro­gr­a­­mme. Moving away from the long-­debated mapping of poverty based on para­meters of income alone, a new app­roach is being adopted under the Centre’s flagship poverty-eradication prog­ramme, Mission Antyodaya. The aim is to use the resources of ongoing government programmes through a new saturation approach to meet the post-2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for eliminating poverty by 2030.

Poverty will now be measured on the indices of social and gender equality, agricultural development, livelihood options, rural infrastructure such as power and roads, health and food security, education, skill-training and enterprise, housing, land ownership and access to bank credit, among others. “SDG covers all forms of poverty,” says Amarjeet Sinha, secretary, Department of Rural Development. “I can be poor if I don’t have access to housing, education or skills, or if I am malnourished or weak because of gender-based discrimination. As poverty is multi-dimensional, we need to address all the issues.”

In his budget speech, finance minister Arun Jaitley said the new programme, in its first phase, will seek to improve the well-being of one crore households spread across 50,000 gram panchayats by 2019. Even as the process of mapping and selecting these gram panchayats out of around 1.42 lakh in the country for rolling out the programme is being done with the help of state governments, 35 indicators have been fixed for identifying the beneficiaries and also measure the success of the programme. Field functionaries will be deployed to oversee the work and monitor the outcomes, while measuring outcomes at all levels is likely to be more uniform due to the pre-defined goals or indicators. The DISHA (District Development Coordination and Monitoring) committee comprising MPs, MLAs, zila parishad head and mayors of urban and local bodies will monitor the outcomes looking at the same set of indicators and programmes.

Given the mission’s multiple goals, 18 departments—the National Health Mission, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Panchayati Raj and so on—will be ­working with the rural development ministry to implement the programme. Under the draft framework shared with the states, “social capital” (in terms of instances of community participation) has to be a major yardstick for selection of the gram panchayats, howsoever remote.

Sinha points out five categories that will be prioritised in the selection: first, villages that have become free of open defecation, implying there is already some social capital there as people have come together to work for a cause; second, wherever there is a strong women’s self-help group (SHG) movement; third, villages covered under Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana; fourth, those that come under urban clusters; and fifth, villages that have a large deficiency of irrigation facilities or a grave water table problem and need to be made drought-proof urgently. “We will select the panchayats based on these criteria and share the list with the states. The list will be finalised taking into account where they want the poverty eradication programmes to be focused. Even in backward regions, the focus will be on gram panchayats that have built good social capital,” says Sinha.

Women will be central to the poverty eradication programme as they have been found to be the game-changers in livelihood missions, improving PDS distribution, entrepreneurial ventures and other development efforts. Out of 33 ODF (open defecation free) gram panchayats Sinha visited in the recent past, he found women SHGs to be the “prime movers” in 27.

“Many of the social gains happen only where women have organised themselves, not elsewhere,” he says. “If that is the case, we must focus on the efforts of the women’s groups. Today, 3.5 crore women are actively involved in SHGs across the country. We are trying to involve them in the social development programmes. In fact, we are making educated women from among them a community cadre of social auditors. We have developed a certificate course with TISS, Mumbai. The women social auditors would also be asked to provide input on how to improve the programmes and outcomes.”

Ahead of the programme being rolled out in April, a baseline study is being carried out in coordination with the states. A headstart has been made with the Socio-Economic Census 2011 ­having helped to identify households and their deprivation. As per Sinha, roughly around Rs 2.5 lakh crore ­(inc­luding 14th Finance Commission grants to panchayats and the states’ share) is expected to be invested in all the ­programmes to be undertaken under this mission.

Kerala chief secretary S.M. Vija­ya­nand calls the programme an imp­rovement on earlier attempts at eradicating ­poverty. “The earlier ­attempts were in silos, with a top-down approach to ­attacking different asp­ects of poverty, while now a bottom-up ­approach has been mandated by the ministry of rural development and the Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP), so they have to do a situational analysis and try to identify local ­priorities,” says Vijayanand, who bel­ieves SHGs and gram panchayats backed by NREGA and a stepped-up skill development plan would be the main pillars of the programme.

Experts point out that the SHG experience has not been uniform across the country. Although the government, corporates and multilateral global agencies have set up some of the SHGs, the majority comprise village women coming together voluntarily. The latter are proving to be major change-agents as their strength lies in the volunteers’ willingness to take on new challenges. There are nearly 30 lakh SHGs in India, with nearly 3 crore rural women linked to them. Many SHGs are actively backed by state governments. For instance, in Kerala, the Kudumbashree initiative enjoys government support and works in a number of areas in close coordination with gram panchayats. However, in some states, the SHGs engage only in saving and credit activities.

“Women are better managers than men, but they do not usually get opportunity or support within the family. The SHG enables her to draw on the collective strength of the members,” says Manoj Rai of Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), an NGO that works in 12 states. “She may be putting in only small amounts of money, but she is assured of greater support, which helps her break out of the vicious circle of poverty and exclusion. That is why poverty programmes linked to SHGs have been found to be more successful.”

Tied into the anti-poverty programmes is the NDA government’s promise to double farmers’ income. This will see more emphasis on animal husbandry and other income-generating activities for rural India, as well as private sector engagement in skill-development and enterprise development through the PPP (public-private partnership) mode.

Amitabh Behar, executive director of Delhi-based NGO National Foundation for India, believes the concepts on which the new approach to poverty-eradication is based are not new and, in fact, two critical demands of civil society organisations working on issues concerning sustainable development have finally been addressed. “We have always been demanding two things—a bottom-up micro-planning approach so that the community plans for its own needs, and convergence around the plans that the communities are already making with the existing government schemes and programmes. It is good that the plan is trying to address both,” says Behar. “My only concern is that there is no actual real allocation for this scheme. It will have convergence and integrate several programmes like food, watershed and so on, but to run a programme of this kind, you do need a certain amount of operational infrastructure, which has not been taken care of.”

Vijayanand too shares this concern. “We would have been happier if more funds had been allocated,” he says, stressing that unless there is a focus on health, education and nutrition for children up to adolescence, the real issues behind poverty cannot be addressed.

Shaktikanta Das, secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, counters this and insists “there is enough money already available”. He points out that Rs 3 lakh crore is spent every year under various schemes in rural areas, including central government schemes, state government schemes and centrally assisted schemes. “In fact, I would say that for any anti-poverty programme, there is enough money available in the current allocation under various programmes and schemes of the Centre and the states,” he says. “The app­roach, now, is to prepare micro and targeted plans for individual villages or cluster of villages.”

Experts agree that although no special resources allocations have been made, the new micro-planning-led targeted programme is an improvement on earlier disjointed efforts. If the programme is rolled out in keeping with the spirit of people’s participation that seems to be its USP, it could help change the lives of millions for the better.