Public Policy Initiatives to Enable Access to Sustainable Livelihood to Rural Populace in India : A Framework Based Analysis

Nearly 70 percent of the people in India live in rural areas and of them almost 25.7 percent live Below Poverty Line (based on NSSO 2011-12 report).The number of rural people in India is 833.1 million of which 216.5 million are estimated to be Below Poverty Line (BPL). There is pressing need to develop rural India to ensure balanced and sustainable economic growth in the country. A plethora of Rural Development initiatives have been formulated developed and implemented from time to time by the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), Government of India in order to alleviate poverty from the face of India so as to ensure sustainable livelihood to the rural populace. This paper explains through a framework, the context, dimensions, policies and schemes considered by the MoRD for enabling access to sustainable livelihood to rural dwellers in India. The framework based analysis enables to easily comprehend the way the public sector delivery mechanism functions towards realizing the objective of equitable and sustainable development. The framework has been developed on the basis of Meta-analytic survey of government reports and websites. An effort is also made to briefly describe the rationale, dimensions and schemes considered for enabling access to sustainable livelihood with the help of statistical data obtained from macro data sources