Major Employment Programmes In India
The Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) (launched in 1978-79 and extended all over the country in 1980-81 was essential. conceived as an anti-poverty programme under the Sixth Five Year Plan. Through a programme of asset endowment, it was also meant to provide self-employment in a variety of activities like sericulture, ar activities in the primary sector; weaving, handicrafts, etc. in the secondary sector; and service and business activities in the tertiary sector. Under the Sixth Plan, the IRDP aimed at covering 15 million families in all the blocks of the country. Thus on average, about 3,000 families in a block were expected to receive assistance under this programme.
The assets provided to households were financed through a mix of government subsidy and institutional credit on an average subsidy-credit ratio of 1:2. The target for employment generation was fixed at 3 million Standard Person Years (SYP) in the Seventh Plan. Under the Seventh Plan and IRDP identified families with income less than Rs: 4,800 per annum to provide them with a mix of subsidy and bank credit. During the Seventh Plan around 18.2 million families and in eight years from 1990-91 to 1998-99 another 20.0 million families were assisted. However, the exact amount of employment generated has not been estimated. The IRDP and allied programmes have been restructured into a single self-employment programme called Swarnajayanti Gram Swarojgar Yojana (SGSY) since April 1999.
The scheme of Training Rural Youth for Self-Employment (TRYSEM) was initiated in 1979 to tackle the unemployment problem among rural youth. It aimed at training about 2 lakh rural youths every year to enable them to become self-employed. Unac scheme 40 youths were to be selected from each block and for being eligible for selection” person should belong to a rural family having an income less than Rs. 3,500 per year. making selection, members of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes were given process Under the scheme a minimum of one-third of the rural youths trained were to be women and TRYSEM was merged into Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana in April 1999.
In February 1989 the government announced a new wage employment scheme, the Nehru Rozgar Yojana for intensive employment creation in 120 backward districts. However, later on, it was felt that there was no need to have the separate NREP, RLEGP and the Jawahar Lal Nehru Rozgar Yojana. These wage employment programmes. had the same objective and similar thrust. Therefore, these programmes were merged into a single rural employment programme on April 1, 1989, and it was given the name Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (JRY).
” The JRY completed eleven years in March 1999. The JRY has been restructured with effect from April 1999 and has been renamed as Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojana ( JGSY). In the first ten years, the JRY generated 7,373 million man-days of employment. Thus in quantitative terms, the performance of the JRY was not distinctly better than that of the NREP and RLEGP.
However, in two respects the JRY was superior to the NREP/RLEGP regime. First, under the JRY there was a clear change in the priorities in favour of economically productive investments, especially which enhance the productivity of the land. Second, the JRY approach involving panchayats in the planning and implementation of employment schemes was superior to the bureaucratic approach followed under the NREP/ RLEGP.
The objective of JGSY is the creation of infrastructure and durable assets at the village level to increase opportunities for sustained employment to the rural poor. The wage employment under JGSY is provided normally to people belonging to households below the poverty line. There is no sectoral earmarking of resources under JGSY. However, 22.5 per cent of annual allocation must be spent on schemes for the benefit of Scheduled Castes / Scheduled Tribes and 3 per cent of annual allocation is to be utilised for the creation of barrier-free infrastructure for the disabled. Among other employment programmes, the most notable programmes are the Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS), the Swarna Jayanti Rozgar Yojana ( SJSRY) and Prime Minister’s Rozgar Yojana (PMRY).
The EAS aims at providing 100 days of unskilled manual work on demand to two members of a rural family in the age group of 18 to 60 years in the agricultural lean season within the blocks covered under the scheme. The EĄS has now been universalized to make it applicable to all the rural blocks of the country. During 1996-97 to 1999-2000, a total of 1,533.7 million man-days employment was generated under the scheme.
The SJSRY came into operation from December 1, 1997, subsuming the earlier urban poverty alleviation programmes, viz., Nehru Rozgar Yojana, Prime Ministers In Eradication Programme and Urban Basic Services Programme. The Programme aims to provide gainful employment to the urban, unemployed or underemployed poor by encouraging the setting up of self-employment ventures or provision of wage employment.
The funding of the SUSRY is being done on a 75:25 basis between the Centre and the States. It comprises two special schemes, viz., the Urban Self-Employment Programme and the Urban Wage Employment Programme Prime Minister’s Rozgar Yojana (PMRY) was designed to provide self-employment to more than a million educated unemployed youth by setting up of seven lakh micro-enterprises under the Eighth Five Year Plan. During the Eighth Plan, while loans in 7.70 lakh cases were sanctioned, the actual disbursement of loans was in 5.76 lakh cases. The scheme was continued in the Ninth Five Year Plan In the first three years of the Ninth Plan, loans were disbursed in 5.0 lakh cases which employed 7.4 lakh persons.
Check out these notes on National Rural Employment Guarantee Act NREGA