A study on the effectiveness of Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana in district Udham Singh Nagar of Uttarakhand
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Date
2014-06
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G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar - 263145 (Uttarakhand)
Abstract
Poverty is the state where there is a lack of certain amount of material possessions or money.Today, most of Indian population lives below poverty line, unable to fulfil its basic need of food, clothes and shelter. Since the inception of economic planning in India, effort has been made in successive plans to mitigate the incidence of poverty. Therefore various anti-poverty programmes had developed by Government of India. But most of them could not lead to balanced and overall development of rural and poor people. With a view to remove this drawback, the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) was introduced in 1999. The objective of the SGSY was to bring the assisted poor families (Swarozgaries) above the Poverty Line by ensuring appreciable sustained level of income over a period of time. This objective is to be achieved by inter alia organising the rural poor into Self Help Groups (SHGs) through the process of social mobilization, their training and capacity building and provision of income generating assets. SHG has to be a group of rural poor who volunteer to organize themselves in a group. Now the SGSY programme has been closed, but SHGs operational under this scheme are still functioning. Thus, there is a need to study that to what extant SGSY has been effective. Keeping a fact in mind, the present study was undertaken to study the profile characteristics of women SHGs, to assess the effectiveness of SHGs and the constraints faced by women SHGs under SGSY. The study was conducted in two randomly selected blocks viz. Rudrapur and Sitarganj of U.S. Nagar district of Uttarakhand state. Eight SHGs were selected randomly through chit method i.e. four from Rudrapur and four from Sitarganj block. Descriptive research design was used to meet the objectives of the study. The data was collected with the help of interview guide prepared on the basis of parameters given by the Government of India i.e. credit and subsidy, increase in income, trainings, market support, infrastructure facility and microenterprise development. Besides, interview guide, focus group discussion was also used to
enrich data. The findings of the study revealed that majority of the SHGs (75%) had 10 members in a group, half of them (50%) were from SC category, most of the SHGs (75%) had no group leader election, majority (62.5%) follow group norms, had no drop outs (87.5%), most of the SHGs (75%) had life insurance and majority of SHGs had monthly income up to Rs. 8000. It was also found that half of the SHGs (50%) had knowledge of loan and subsidy, had information related to income (50%), majority (75%) got training, block office provide market place to some of the SHGs (37.5%), choose skill base activity (62.5%), had no infrastructure facility (75%) and less than half of the SHGs (37.5%) had group level micro-enterprise. The major constraints perceived were unsupportive attitude of officials, no variety in trainings, lack of infrastructure and knowledge of the programme components. The findings may enable the policy makers and planners to review and redesign such self employment programme in better way and may serve as bench mark for planning and conducting researches of such and similar nature in future.
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