Regarding development options, Shri Nitish Sen Gupta has brought out some interesting, disturbing, probing difficult areas into open. One cannot deny that his assertion that most of India’s anti-poverty programmes in past suffer from basic weaknesses of ignoring economics and a policy was considered good because it was announced in the name of the poor is correct. His other suggestion to develop supporting measures for agriculture industry, infrastructure and spreading literacy and basic education amongst masses along with his plea for integrating in developmental option with the on-going and in some respect irreversible process of globalisation of international trade and industry are also laudable. Based on my study of our development scenario specially related to rural development, rural industrialisation, non-farming sector development and taking the holistic approach of the problem, I have the following few points for consideration.
The time has come to become less ideological and more practical oriented. In other words we can call it tactical manoeuvrability of this programme has to be understood with reference to the studied objectives. Starting programmes in the name of the poor is not bad in itself provided adequate linkages are ruthlessly ensured. The classic case of infrastructural fund utilisation in integrated rural development programme will bring out the pathetic indifference to the monitoring of funds realised. Most of the decentralised sector have used them as easy money available from below poverty line grant. Direct attack on poverty does not mean total abdication, organised extension machinery, abdication of its responsibility. One may go ahead and also request for the income generating activities in rural areas through ruthlessly entrepreneurship development and initiating the process of percolation theory working at grass-roots. This calls for, apart from attitudinal changes, the development of rural and village industries on cluster basis so that their economic viability is ensured and demonstration, impact becomes clear. This failure has caused heavily and today in the name of village industries we only have some Khadi institutions and pockets of other ISB activities which are not replicable or self-supporting because they are not market oriented. The emphasis on training for the sake of training and giving above marketing activities to individual beneficiaries have caused total loss of confidence and clamour for organised wage employed job. The same can be said in terms of technology application. While scaling up of technology and skills should have been the main theme, we started first importing technology and then wanted to scale down under the garb of developing appropriate technology. Here the loss of confidence, funds, duplication of efforts made the entire exercise redundant and to day CSIR, KVIC, CAPART are struggling hard to come to some common understanding where appropriate technologies for rural industries can be extended on a self-supporting basis. Here again the linkages have been the missing factor and training centres, good institutions all could have been used for extension. follow-up, monitoring, marketing and feedback on a