Taking Tamil Nadu as an example, we argue that isolated projects, such as the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, however well meaning and even if well administered, is nevertheless way off the mark as a solution to the problems faced by the rural poor and rural poor women in particular. In an era when governments and funding agencies swear by participatory methods and replacing top-down approaches by listening to and enlisting the support of grassroots people, to assume that REGA is a revolutionary achievement is to make a mockery of these same approaches and people. Without discounting the short-term value of such enactments, this article addresses itself to the secular erosion in the sources of the livelihoods of rural households, women`s own perceptions and anxieties, and the demands for solutions of a more lasting nature. We will explicate as we go along. 

Tamil Nadu is generally perceived as one of the well-developed and fast-growing States of the country, which perception has enabled it to attract considerable amounts of foreign investment. Nevertheless, the levels of poverty, as measured by the NSSO using the head-count ratio, indicate “the poor are over-represented in Tamilnadu” (See Ghosh, J. 1998. `Assessing Poverty Alleviation Strategies for their Impact on Poor Women: A Study with Special Reference to India`, Discussion Paper 97, October, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Geneva). The conventional notion that growth powered by the secondary and tertiary sectors will generate sufficient employment to absorb surplus labour from the primary sector has not taken place. On the contrary, the primary sector continues to maintain its rank as the largest employer of rural people, even as income from the primary sector has declined over time.

In an attempt to understand the nature of risks faced by the poorest among the poor and also their coping mechanisms, we undertook a “Livelihood Assessment Survey” in several villages across Tamil Nadu between July and October 2004 (see Box 1).

The relevance of reproducing here the observations from the survey lies in the remarkable manner in which people on the ground, women in particular, in their own words linked their inability to make a transition to a better life because of the disjuncture that they perceived between the macro-economic issues of employment and growth on the one hand and the low scale and poor quality of the otherwise “functioning” welfare institutions in their villages on the other.

In several ways our field visits corroborated some of the observations based on secondary data analyses. These include, declining employment opportunities, reduction in the number of days of employment, increase in unemployment among all sections, but particularly among females and the youth, etc. At the outset, it needs to be recorded that across the villages and among almost all sections of the agricultural labour population, the risk and therefore vulnerability due to declining agricultural activities (the most important source of livelihood for those with land as well as for those without land) has increased considerably. The villagers in general, women included, traced the decline in agricultural activities to a combination of factors: the continuous failure of monsoons, the depletion of ground water, the change in cropping patterns, the changes in institutional patterns that govern agrarian relations, etc., all of which combined to erode the livelihood base of much of the agriculture-dependent population. Public intervention programmes by their very design and nature have been singularly ineffective in addressing regressive agrarian structural factors and have more often than not contributed to problems rather than to solutions.

A direct economic consequence of this combination of factors is a decline in the number of days of employment, hitting, in particular, the landless agricultural labour population hard. Most villages have no other major activity that can provide alternate employment (and thereby some source of income) to the erstwhile labour employed in agriculture. Because of this dip in their major source of income, the landless households among the agriculture-based employment groups are the most vulnerable since they have nothing to fall back upon. Consequently, these households are forced to cope by cutting down the number of meals they have in a day, discontinue the schooling of their children, delay seeking medical attention for their ailments, default on repayment schedules on their loans and/or become more indebted, thereby further increasing their vulnerability.

The gender question that emerges here is the differential impact that this vulnerability holds for men and women: while to some extent men venture out in search of coolie work, at times even staying out for days together, such options are not available to women. They have neither the resources nor the support system to enable them to make these search trips. At the same time, we need to stress that a resolution to this gender problem does not lie only (or not even) in enabling women to go out in search of coolie work, but in addressing the larger question of the erosion in the main source of livelihood of these populations.

All sections of the population were extremely anxious about the uncertainty facing their children, education or otherwise. Their hopes of a better future for their children were shattered because of their realization that the children had no future either in the “traditional” occupation, that is agriculture (which was declining), or in “modern” occupations; the latter required more and different kind of qualifications that the village population could, as of now, ill afford. Women were frustrated that their work and levels of earnings were not sufficient to enable their children to rise above a certain level of education and/or acquire any form of professional skill. This, in turn, implied that they could not get into better-paying jobs a necessary condition for reducing the intensity of insecurity of their lives and very existence.

The women in particular also emphasised that they did not want any further ad hoc “schemes” from the government. They posed two hard questions: one, restoring their source of livelihood and, two, enabling their children to make a transition to a better source of livelihood through higher education. These questions, in fact, made us re-examine the rationale of our “social sector” and its relationship to “economic development”.

The picture of gender gaps in achievement/outcomes that one routinely encounters while analysing data (be it secondary or primary) has more often than not led to the institution of “welfare” measures ostensibly aimed at eliminating such discrimination and in also “empowering” the discriminated. The persistence of poverty and vulnerability despite the “social sector” and despite any number of studies documenting the linkages and connections between macro-economic policies and changes on the ground, has contributed very little to the way discrimination is perceived at the policy level and/or in the manner data are gathered. There is, in fact, at the policy or macro-economic level, very little use for nuanced analysis (of the type provided from the field-based study mentioned above) of the underlying causes contributing to gender gaps/discrimination, vulnerability and disempowerment.  

Based on an overall review of current employment and labour market conditions in India, Ghose (See Ghose, A. 2004. `The Employment Challenge in India`, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 39, No. 48, Nov 27 Dec 3, pp. 5106-5116) arrives at a similar conclusion, namely, the futility of making much ado about ad hoc employment schemes. According to him: “The core of the employment problem is that of the working poor, and overcoming it must be the priority objective of employment policy at this juncture…it is in the world of the working poor that child labour and widest gender inequality are to be found…. Besides, it is arguable that addressing the problem of the working poor will create the conditions for improving the average quality of regular wage-paid jobs, while improving the quality of regular paid jobs is most unlikely to address the problem of the working poor…priority must be placed on generating and sustaining a process of labour transfer from self-employment and casual wage employment to regular wage employment. For, in the absence of such a process, special employment schemes the main instrument available for reducing underemployment and for increasing the real wage rate for casual labour will need to be implemented on an ever-expanding scale just to prevent the problem of the working poor from worsening (emphasis added).”

But is the economy geared towards “generating and sustaining a process of labour transfer from self-employment and casual wage employment to regular wage employment”?