Articles by V M Rao

Safety nets to support the hardcore poor form the foundation of the strategy for poverty elimination. This paper brings out the alarming state of the existing safety nets and describes a decentralised approach to make them more effective. The approach is in the nature of extension of the decentralised mode being used by National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme to provide employment guarantee to unskilled labourers.

Provision of social security to the unorganised workers is currently receiving the urgent attention of the central government and some of the state governments. This paper, based on a large sample of unorganised workers - construction workers, domestic workers and agricultural labourers - from Karnataka, presents indices of their economic conditions and deprivation to show how inadequate it is to use the below poverty line criterion for providing benefits to unorganised sector workers. The priority social security needs are analysed to show the diversity within and across sectors, and to review the policy measures - existing and those on the anvil.

The functioning of the Public Distribution System (PDS) in India has come under scrutiny because of rising burden of subsidy and storage cost and meagre coverage of the poor and the actual benefits received by them. It is argued in this paper that the existing system has become unwieldy and unsustainable and that the time has come to review it, especially in the context of panchayat raj institutions (PRI) and the role they are expected to play in regard to the rural poor. With the help of illustrative data from two drought-prone districts of Karnataka, an attempt is made in the paper to demonstrate the feasibility of a decentralised system operated by PRI based on the local staples consumed by the poor. The result seems encouraging enough to suggest that it would be worthwhile to have more substantive investigation as also pilot projects to test the workability of the decentralised system.