Abstract
Over the course of the last few decades, the livelihood approach has emerged as the dominant policy tool for poverty reduction, with the general diagnosis that global poverty is concentrated in rural areas and its agricultural livelihood. The prescription has thus been to focus on rural development and agrarian change to eradicate poverty. Even though India has had a long history of the poverty reduction policy regime, the turn to the livelihood discourse is much more recent. The State of India’s Livelihood (SOIL) report, published since 2008, is a reference document that collates data, comprehends patterns and tracks the dynamics of conditions of this livelihood sector. Girija Srinivasan and Narasimhan Srinivasan outline the 2016 report within the 4-P framework, focused on the poor, policy environment, potentials and promotion. The 2016 report explores the impact of budgetary allocations, policy measures, financial services and climate change on the prospects and potential of the livelihood sector. It also takes up conditions and concerns of livelihood in the handloom sector and India’s North East region. Finally, the report incorporates excerpts from the practitioners’ roundtable that included representatives of the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, BASIX, Bhartia Agro-Industrial Foundation, Rapo Bank, International Fund for Agricultural Development, Professional Assistance for Development Action, Jindal Stainless Limited, Hand in Hand and Access Development Services.
Taking up the issue of the impact on and conditions of the livelihood sector, the SOIL 2016 report analyses them in terms of quality and equity with a special focus on the rural agrarian realm. It emphasises the need to deliver results through enabling conditions of competition-enhancing policies, dismantling remnants of the licence raj and a lean state with a primarily governance role. It laments jobless growth and emphasises the need for skill development, financial inclusion and climate change resilient employment strategies with the potential to make the rural agrarian sector remunerative and lucrative. The report while wanting the state to get leaner is expecting it to perform more diverse roles. This would involve a different pattern of governing people and resources beyond the bureaucratic assemblage associated with the modern state. The report, however, does not elaborate on what these new patterns of governing need to be in order to cater to the diverse and complex livelihood sector. This oversight is further reflected in the fact that the report takes up a wide variety of governmental initiatives for poverty reduction and livelihood promotion without discussing the possible ways of coordination across them to ‘deliver results’.
Looking at the impact of various governmental initiatives and climate change, the report begins with the policy and fiscal framework to highlight the pursuit of a clean, green, poverty-free India through improved farm profitability. For the major policy initiatives for poverty reduction and livelihood programmes, undertaken by a wide range of governmental departments, the report points to the need for shifting attention to the livelihood space and market linkages rather than community mobilisation. It further notes that the focus on direct benefit transfers has to take into cognisance issues like the diversion of cash and price fluctuations. Skill development has to standardise certification and categorise skill centres. Employment guarantee schemes, with issues like declining average days and rationing rather than demand-driven employment, have to facilitate women participation in decision making and for the capacity building of Panchayati Raj Institutions to plan and implement schemes and record unmet demand. For financial inclusion, the report calls for a shift from a subsidy to an insurance-based regime, with customised services, long-term loans for agriculture and regularisation of livestock financing which is sporadic and without a guiding philosophy. Finally, the report points out that with agriculture being both a contributor to as well as a mitigator of climate change, there is need for a bottom-up vulnerability assessment, soil and water management, promoting indigenous livestock and developing community-based adaptation strategies.
The questions that can be posed to the report’s prescriptions across policy initiatives are: is the creation of livelihood space and market linkage possible without community mobilisation? Is livelihood the same as wage employment for income? Can digitisation ensure accountability without participation? Will adaptation be sustainable without locally situated common but differentiated responsibility? Without reflecting on such questions, any assessment of the impact of governmental initiatives and climate change on the prospects and conditions of livelihood sector would be limited at best.
After the impact assessments, the report takes up the particular concerns of the handloom sector and the North East. In the section on the handloom sector, the second largest livelihood source after agriculture, the report highlights the governmental aim to revive, reform and restructure the sector. This is undertaken through health and general insurance for weavers, comprehensive weavers’ cluster development and modernisation of pre-loom activity, product diversifications and design inputs as well as marketing. However, as noted by the authors, weavers’ collectives with their high membership and low activity are further strained by the reduction of reserved products for handloom from 22 to 11.
Taking up the concerns of the North-East region in terms of livelihood prospects and challenges, the report looks at agriculture, sericulture, livestock, impact of climate change, employment and skill development prospects and access to finance. Poor infrastructure and access to market seem to be a common tragedy across these domains of the livelihood sector in the region. The authors call for employment and skill development schemes in the region to focus on potentially viable sectors with an emphasis on improving upon the poor coverage of institutional credit in the region to change the status of the North-East as a net importer of food. Speaking of the concerns of the handloom industry, the report sees weaving as the only livelihood source in the sector ignoring linkages with cotton cultivation, agriculture, yarn and dye making. The potential of linkages across these sources offers diversity and complex livelihood possibilities for the region. Thus, the report could move beyond the governmental understanding of the handloom sector in its diversity and complex inter-linkages. While taking up the concerns of the north-east region, the report reiterates the historical concerns of poor infrastructure due to geographical conditions. What is needed is to explore possibilities of livelihood amidst poor infrastructure with major geographical hurdles. One also needs to account for the ethnic and political diversity of the area and the conflicts therein.
The report also attempts to provide a more diverse view on the livelihood sector, by including observations and comments made by practitioners during a practitioners’ roundtable. This involved their reflections on the prospects of livelihood, discernible policy frameworks, role of GDP growth, situation of agriculture-based livelihood, impact of climate change and governmental policies, prospects and priorities over the next five years. The practitioners argue that amidst jobless growth, livelihood is increasingly defined as being deliverable from governmental platforms through urbanisation, income generation, financial inclusion and corporate initiatives without a discernible policy framework. They opine that GDP growth does not aggregate agricultural value chains but facilitates an unorganised sector characterised by deplorable working conditions thereby creating opportunities without claim-making capacities. Agriculture-based livelihoods are declining, in terms of percentage of land and labour directed to it, as climate change threatens its prospects with uncertain seasonality. Policy responses have to sustain small farm-based, rain-fed and increasingly feminised agriculture by linking the label of ‘climate change initiatives’ with vulnerabilities addressed and promotion of rural skills for making agriculture resilient and lucrative. In terms of the priorities for the next five years for the livelihood sector, the practitioners point to skills, market linkages, affordable and accessible financial services, women’s rights, and climate change resilient agrarian farm and non-farm sectors within the larger policy framework. With the practitioners’ roundtable, the report makes an important advance, but leaves the reader wanting with regard to questions about the how of the practice in livelihood sectors and lessons about what works and why.
The report remains weak on the conceptual front using livelihood, employment and income-generation interchangeably. As a result, its prescription takes the simplistic liberal path of promoting skills, financial services and market access as the solution to rural and agrarian-dominated understanding of poverty. In doing so, it fails to account for the complexities and diversities of the sector that the report highlighted in their overview chapter. Further, the report overlooks concerns of aspirations, governance, collective action vis-à-vis budgetary allocations, policy initiatives and climate change. It could substantially improve its analysis by taking into account the role of aspirations in pursuit of which livelihood becomes the means in its explanation for rural, agrarian and handloom sectors as well as the North East.
Despite these limitations the report attaches each of these chapters with an annexure detailing empirical data available for each of the issues impacting livelihood and concerns of the handloom sector and the North East region. In doing so, it lives up to its stated goal of being an important reference document for the livelihood sector with rich empirical data across diverse issues and concerns.