The latest survey of the rural population throws up a few interesting findings, but none more revealing than the fact that despite all the hype about Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and other such entitlement schemes, back-breaking poverty continues to be the rule rather than the exception in India’s villages. Mahatma Gandhi said India lives in its villages. Yes, but more than sixty years after Swaraj, those villages are still stricken with poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, etc. Successive politicians have paid lip service to the villages because their votes essentially come from there but it is the towns and cities which get disproportionately high allocations for development. The Socio-Economic Caste Census, the first of its kind since 1934, confirmed that 31.2 percent of the rural population is poor. This finding is at odds with other such findings of rural poverty conducted earlier by the now defunct Planning Commission. Indeed, the SECC 2011 survey itself was designed differently from the earlier surveys insofar as it relies on seven socio-economic parameters to define deprivation, as against the latter which measured incomes and consumptions to gauge poverty.
Among the seven specific tests for determining deprivation, were such questions as ownership of a one-room house with kachha walls and roof, absence of an adult member between 16 and 59 years, no literate member above 25 years. Illiteracy is far from removed in rural India. Thirty-six percent of 88 crore people in villages were illiterate. More surprisingly, the figure is higher by two percent since the last census in 2011. Even among the literate rural people, more than a fifth had not finished primary school with only 5.4 percent completing high school. Rajasthan topped in illiteracy with 47.6 percent of the rural people remaining unlettered. Kerala reported only 11.4 percent illiteracy. Thirty percent of rural households were landless and depended on manual labour. Again, seventy-five percent of rural households subsisted on a monthly income of Rs 5,000. Of the total 24.39 crore households in the country, 17.91 crore were rural. Among these, 10.69 crore were categorized as deprived households. As per the estimates, more than 90 percent of the adult members in rural households held no salaried jobs and worked as casual labourers. At least one member of five percent of rural households held a salaried government job while 4.58 percent of households paid income or professional tax. Eleven percent households had a refrigerator. Unsurprisingly, the number of households with a mobile phone was over 68 percent. At least the telecom revolution had breached the urban-rural barrier thanks to the fierce competition among cellular service providers and low tariffs. It is this telecom revolution that the Modi Government is trying to harness, to deliver targeted subsidies and other services far more efficiently than was the case hitherto. Again, another revolution which has reached the countryside is that of two-wheelers, with over 20 percent of rural households owning some type of motorized vehicle. Curiously, just last Friday, data pertaining to socio-economic survey was made public while the caste-based data was withheld. Given the political sensitivities about the caste enumeration, the Government might have erred on the side of caution but having conducted the caste survey, its findings must be put in the public domain. Apparently, the findings of the caste survey are to be made available to Parliament though the timing was still to be decided.
Releasing the findings of the survey last Friday, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said these would serve as useful inputs in the allocation of resources and for tailoring poverty-and–illiteracy programmes. That despite reasonably good administrations in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar in the last decade or more, the three states continue to rank the poorest in the country, suggests the need for an urgent re-think about the existing rural-based schemes. Livings standards might have demonstrably risen in the urban areas since the onset of economic liberalization in the 90s, but the gains were yet to percolate fully to the rural areas. This is the challenge for the policy makers and administrators in New Delhi and in various state capitals. Modi’s emphasis on development, hopefully, would begin to translate into reality in the next few years so that our villages too can partake in the gains of a true Swaraj.
