Rural Development Program: An Introspect Towards Reform in 21st Century

Abstract

Just as the whole universe is contained in the self, so is India contained in the --- Mahatama Gandhi.The Rural development generally refers to the process of improving the quality of life and economic welfare of people living in relatively isolated and sparsely populated areas. There is an urgent need for a second green revolution since the first green revolution has run out of steam, and has been eaten up by population increases, and significantly enough has caused massive environmental side effects, including water and pollution. The second green revolution should in our view include: agriculture R&D, shift to central and eastern U.P./Orissa/Bihar, more efficient pricing and use of water, fertilizer, and electricity and up scaling rural agro industry, including supply chain management, etc. Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is considered as a Silver Bullet for eradicating rural poverty and unemployment, by way of generating demand for productive labour force in villages. It provides an alternative source of livelihood which will have an impact on reducing migration, restricting child labor, alleviating poverty, and making villages self-sustaining through productive assets creation such as road construction, cleaning up of water tanks, soil and water conservation work, etc. for which it has been considered as the largest anti-poverty programme in India.In this paper, based on the secondary data, an attempt has been made to comprehensively understand the development effort to rebuild the rural life and livelihood on the basis of various secondary data. Furthermore, it focuses on various approaches for rural development including Gandhian approach.