SOIL Report 2008 - ACCESS Development Services

Chapter IPath dependency is a useful concept for livelihood status analysis and can be applied to all three cuts –segmental, sectoral and spatial.Pathdependency is auseful conceptfor livelihoodstatus analysisand can beapplied toall three cuts– segmental,sectoral andspatial.In case of population segments, the most oppressive form of path dependency was the caste-basedoccupation system in India. So, a scavenger’s son had to be a scavenger and a brahmin’s son, a priest ora learned man. In today’s India, it shows up in strident demands for reservations in government jobs andseats in professional colleges, and equally visceral opposition to it from the “forwards”.In sectoral terms, path-dependency shows up when we see erstwhile large employment share subsectorslike handloom weaving, or safety-match making. Both of these have been protected by laws andregulations, on the grounds that lakhs of people were employed in them. The protection of handloomsled to oppression of powerlooms and the mill sector – there was a time, till the mid 1980s, when it wasillegal to establish a powerloom, or increase production of a mill beyond specified capacity (even withoutadding additional machinery) without prior government permission. The handloom sector becamemore and more protection and subsidy-dependent. The introduction of the well-meaning Janata Sareescheme in 1977 to keep handloom weavers employed, led to massive corruption and deskilling and yet,this did not save the handloom sector, in the face of massive consumer preference shifts to powerloomand mill-woven cloth.Spatially, path dependency shows up in Bihar versus Tamil Nadu. This can be traced to the land revenuesystem introduced by the British. Where they carried out ‘permanent settlements’ and specified a fixedlevel of revenue, the ryots had an incentive to be more productive, since they kept the entire remainingsurplus. But where the land revenue continued to be collected by Zamindars, with multiple layers ofintermediaries like bahrails and gumastas, the ryots had little left and so began to produce less and less,barely able to eke out a living. This is the tragedy of most of Bihar and Eastern UP, which in spite ofbeing part of the most fertile Indo-Gangetic belt, records rather low levels of agricultural productivity,which in turn have thwarted growth and diversification into the non-farm sector in contrast to Tamil Naduand coastal Andhra Pradesh. The demand for new states is a way of breaking spatial path dependency.6. Livelihood promotion–What has been tried? What more can be done?There have been many efforts at livelihood promotion – by the government, by civil society andincreasingly by the corporate sector. Here we look at some of the prominent ones, with a view todrawing lessons from a historical analysis.6.1 Livelihood programmes of the GovernmentGovernment poverty alleviation programs can be classified into four types: (i) wage employmentprogrammes; (ii) self-employment programmes; (iii) minimum needs programmes; (iv) and areadevelopment programmes.30Also called rural works programmes, wage employment programmes provide employment whilegenerating useful public goods. In 1973, the Congress government in Maharashtra began the one ofthe most significant of these programmes in India – the Employment Guarantee Scheme. It guaranteedemployment to the rural poor in Maharashtra through piece rate wage labour. In 1977, the nationalJanata Dal government adopted this scheme and expanded it to the whole country as the National RuralEmployment Programme (NREP). However, in the implementation of this programme, the landless wereoften unable to access the scheme – in order to remedy this, the Rural Landless Employment GuaranteeProgramme (RLEGP) came into being in the mid-1980s. Unlike NREP, it guaranteed employment tothe landless poor. There were two area specific wage employment programmes. One is the NehruRozgar Yojana (NRY), which addresses wage employment issues in urban areas. The other was theEmployment Assurance Scheme (EAS), which provided wage employment in resource poor areas. In30