DEVELOPMENT OF LIVELIHOOD INDEX FOR DIFFERENT REGIONS OF GUJARAT
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Date
2012-07
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jau,junagadh
Abstract
Although Gujarat is emerging as an important state in agricultural and industrial front, the benefit of green revolution has not reached to rural and tribal people in the districts which are rainfed, drought prone, flood affected with hilly terrain and mountaineous. Hence, to strike a balanced regional development, an integrated approach for sustainability of livelihood of these disadvantaged people has become imperative. Keeping this in view, the present study aims to examine the level of livelihood status in Gujarat.
Sector wise data on various indicators of livelihood status at district level were collected, compiled and analyzed for the five different periods, viz., 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, for the agricultural sector, the data for five more years, viz., 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 were also collected. Total numbers of indicators selected were sixty nine.
Commensurate with the objectives of the study, region-wise as well as district-wise integrated indices were constructed separately for all the sectors and all the periods, using Prem Narayan’s methodology. Point to point compound growth rates were computed to examine the temporal changes in livelihood indices.
The major findings emerged from the study revealed that there exists spatio-temporal disparity in Gujarat. The rank of all the regions remained same for all the periods but the position of all the districts changed in different periods, except Dahod district which ranked last in all the periods. There also found greater variability in the district level indices as compared to region level. The variations in these indices were mainly governed by agricultural sector, infrastructural sector and economic sector. The district of Dang which was being concerned backward was found first position in their livelihood status among all the districts in all the periods, except in 2006 and 2010. In case of agricultural status, the district of Anand occupied the first position while Amreli district ranked last position.
Middle Gujarat and North Gujarat have been found highly developed in their livelihood status whereas Kutchh was found to be low developed. Medium level districts of the state were relatively more thickly populated as compared to high and low level districts during 2006-10, but an increase in the population was relatively more pronounced in case of low developed districts as compared to high developed districts in 2010. This implies that though various development programmes of government have resulted in an improvement in the various sectors of economy over a period of time, its impact appears to have been eroded by the rapid growth of population particularly in low developed districts.
The region of Kutchh needs an urgent attention of the state government as well as policy makers as it was put in low developed category in agricultural sector for all the periods i.e. from 2001 to 2010. Further, it was noticed that in case of low agricultural status districts, the proportion of area with respect to their population was found greater as compared to other groups during 2006-10. The magnitude and direction of growth has been changed with the change in the base year.
Proper execution of various government programmes should be uniformly undertaken in all the districts of the state for improvement of agricultural status in the state. Location specific plans for the development of agricultural sector, prioritization of areas of investment, setting-up of more number of agro-based industries particularly in the rural areas, creating a kind of infrastructure to support the growth of industrial and agricultural sector and special care to allocate the resources optimally on the per capita basis for improving the condition of low developed districts are the major suggestions of this study.
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economics