Increasing influx of people in cities and associated problems cannot be solved only by focusing on infrastructural development in urban areas. There is a need to provide better living conditions and employment opportunities in villages and small towns to tackle urban problems holistically
India, since its birth as an independent nation in 1947, has been predominantly rural with the economy largely dependent on agriculture and allied activities. While some big leaps of development have been taken in the past seven decades, India continues to have large rural population (close to 833-835 million) which is about 68- 70% of the total population.
Policy formulations and financial outlays as prepared in successive five year plans of the then Planning Commission of India (now NITI Aayog), and annual budgets presented in Parliament provide us a good idea how the country looked at the rural landscape and its people who lived in abject poverty and deprivation for decades. The idea of sanctioning huge budgets was to alleviate poverty but that remained a distant dream. The Indian village continued to suffer due to lack of electricity, education, water and healthcare services in countless number of villagers. India was thus (dis) credited with having 1/3rd of global poor residing in the country.
Many years of central planning and efforts could not bring about any perceptible change in the living patterns of the rural folks. While large budgets were allocated and spent on rural development schemes, the fate of the people living away from Delhi or Lucknow, Mumbai or Kolkata, Chennai or Bangalore did not improve significantly. People dying due to lack of healthcare infrastructure, farmers committing suicides due to absence of a proper marketing chain for selling their products at competitive prices or sustained illiteracy due to inadequate educational facilities have been the old and saddening stories of India.
There are now new schemes framed to revive the rural sector which ignite fresh hopes among rural folks and political observers and urban demographers. The new schemes will also impact urban India in many ways because it is urban India which suffers due to unending migration of rural folks into cities putting immense pressure on all city infrastructure. We should also not forget that these migrations are forced migrations and not willingly undertaken.
SPMRM and rural India
The Shyama Prasad Mookerjee Rurban Mission, started with an initial outlay of Rupees 100 crores at three places– Warangal in Andhra Pradesh and Sangli and Buldhana in Maharashtra, hopes to turn the tide. This year’s budget is making substantial provisions for the rural sector.
Announced in August 2014 by the then Rural Development Minister Nitin Gadkari, SPMRM with an increased budgetary allocation of Rs 5142 cr aims at arresting the rural-urban migration, developing clusters of villages with almost the similar amenities that a citizen gets in India and helping Agro economy sustain. Once implemented on the ground in the next few years, it would be nothing less than a miracle as the entire world is now witnessing unprecedented migration into its urban areas.
The question, however, arises now is how effective is this scheme going to be and fulfil hopes of our village brethren? It is not that rural welfare schemes or loan waivers for farmers or rural cooperative movements or rural roads and healthcare schemes were not tried earlier. If these had really helped change the rural scenario, international agencies would not have looked down upon India for its weak social indicators. Also the urban problems of pollution, congestion, water scarcity, pressure on civic amenities would not have been around.
But the final test lies in the implementation of the various schemes. It is only with painstaking rigour in implementation, evaluation and monitoring that the results will be evident. As per some reports, since the scheme was announced in August 2014, not much has happened in the villages taken on pilot basis, people, from Buldhanasay. If this scheme is really going to be a game changer, rural development ministry has to seriously focus its attention and money on proper utilisation of resources. It will have to put in place proper monitoring and implementation machinery. Only in that case the rural to urban migration would slow down as intended. Scholars in this field would keep watch on this. Like in case of United Nations’ MDGs, poverty reduction was an important goal and the then Indian Government claimed to have brought down poverty to a certain extent.
Today cities are suffering due to villages and villages are suffering due to cities. It’s a typical paradox! Both will start living off their own, provided schemes like Smart Cities and Smart Villages become a reality.