Anti Poverty Rural Development in India

For over three decades now, India has experimented with varying strategies for the uplift of the rural poor. The Community Development Programme, National Extension Service, Panchayat Raj, IADP (Integrated Area Development Programme), ‘target groups’ approach, Antyodaya, and Integrated Rural Development and Block plans unmistakably exemplify the national effort to combat with gruesome poverty and unemployment in the rural India. This volume, based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, is perhaps the first to focus, in their totality, on India’s experiences with various rural development programmes. Analyzing the linkages among these strategies vis-a-vis their distinctly defined objectives, the author seeks to demonstrate what positive results our different experiments in anti-poverty rural development have yielded, and where these have gone amiss. He thus spotlights the fundamental issues emerging from the implementation of programmes for rural employment and rural industrialisation, and also sets forth the valuable lessons which Indian experiences have to offer to the densely populated countries in the Third World. To ensure enduring benefits to the rural poor, the thesis underscores, among numerous other remedial measures, the need for the identification of potential beneficiaries, the need for the reorientation of the existing power structure, and the need for the strengthening of institutional support. It also calls for constant public vigil over the linkages between the strategic areas and others, so that the growth centers produce proportional ‘spread effects’Incorporating copious statistical data, the volume is bound to evoke enormous interest in the student’s of economics, economic analysts and planners of rural development in both India and the Third World nations. A scholar with distinguished academic career and recipient of the ‘Outstanding Youngman Award (1977), instituted by the Machilipatnam Jaycees, I. Satya Sundaram (born 10th July 1946) was awarded. …