Poverty Alleviation Programmes — A Critical Assessment

Efforts at poverty alleviation have borne fruit: for the first time since Independence, the percentage of absolute poor in some states is now well below the national average. Yet, despite various strategies, hunger, malnourishment, illiteracy and a lack of basic amenities remain common in many parts of India. Though the policy has evolved progressively over five and a half decades, it has undergone no radical transformation — one finds changes of nomenclature, integration or mutation of programmes, but no radical change in the ownership of assets, the process of production, or the provision of basic amenities.

Scholars identify three major areas of concern that prevent successful implementation:

1. Due to the unequal distribution of land and other assets, the benefits of direct poverty-alleviation programmes have been appropriated by the non-poor.
2. Compared to the magnitude of poverty, the resources allocated are insufficient.
3. The programmes depend mainly on government and bank officials who are often ill-motivated, inadequately trained, corruption-prone and vulnerable to pressure from local elites, so resources are used inefficiently and wasted; there is also non-participation of local-level institutions.

Box 4.4: Ramdas Korwa's Road to Nowhere

Ramdas Korwa of Rachketha village was not overjoyed to learn that he was 'worth' ₹17.44 lakh to the government, which in 1993 decided to lay a three-km road to his village in the name of tribal development. The Pahadi (Hill) Korwas are a listed primitive tribe, but Rachketha village was almost completely devoid of Pahadi Korwas — Ramdas's family was the only real exception, and there was already a kutcha road, to which the authorities 'just added red earth.' What Ramdas actually wanted was simple — "All I want is a little water… How can we have agriculture without water?" — and he pointed out that a few thousand rupees spent on repairing a damaged well on his land would have helped far more than the road. Nobody asked him what he needed or involved him in the solution; in his name they built a road he does not use. The story illustrates how, without the participation of the poor, resources meant for them are wasted on targets that do not serve them. (Source: P. Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought.) …