NEW DELHI: The World Bank has described the much-acclaimed National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREGA) scheme of the UPA government as a policy
barrier hurting economic development and poverty alleviation.
Various schemes of the Indian government like NREGA, watershed programmes and schemes for development of small and medium towns are acting as “policy barriers to internal mobility”, the bank said in its ‘World Development Report’ 2009.
The internal mobility, the report argued, is necessary as “lifting people out of poverty requires shifting populations from villages to cities”. The process of migration should be encouraged, the bank said.
“Negative attitudes held by (the) government and ignorance of the benefits of population mobility have caused migration to be overlooked as a force in economic development,” it said.
The report said economic benefits of migration are not always recognised by policy makers and, in fact, two forms of policy have been attempted in India to counter migration.
“The first response has been to increase rural employment, in an attempt to stem movement out of rural areas … These measures include the recently introduced National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme,” it said.
Indian Agrarian Crisis now moved to www.agrariancrisis.in 