This article was originally published by the Wall Street Journal on February 24, 2010, “Budget 2010: Will Rural India Get a Fair Deal”. Within the article, Ms. K. Seeta Prabhu of the UNDP in New Delhi raises a number of extremely relevant concerns about the rural poor of India:
- 42% of rural farmers live under the poverty line
- Small acreage farmers compose 84% of total farmers
- Low agricultural productivity
- Lack of permanent shelter
- Lack of electricity and highly inefficient energy usage
- Lack of employment opportunities outside of agriculture
The situation described demands attention. In response, Ms. Prabhu recommends that the government should take action by injecting massive amounts of stimulus money into large public work projects to build crop warehouses and public toilets, to usher in another “Green Revolution”, to incentivize the installation of bio-plant stoves, etc. The litany of public projects that Ms. Prabhu wants the local governments to undertake is daunting. I find no fault with the problems identified and the end objectives cited, but I do doubt the realistic feasibility of the list of public projects. These proposed solutions are in fact not new; they have been discussed by the development community for some time. The problem doesn’t lie in the solution ideas themselves, but in the implementation – what has been coined as the “last mile challenge”. It’s agreed that these solutions need to happen, but how?
