MONEY AND BANKING-Accelerated Monetary Expansion

get employment for more than the equivalent of three to five months in a year. The solution to this problem seems to lie in an employment programme for such displaced persons which should go along with, or even precede, a programme for reorganisation-cum-modernisation. A suggestion was made a couple of months ago that Kerala needs to launch an Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS). The proposed decentralisation of development administration will enable the identification of such schemes and to match them with the extent of unemployment in every district. Considerable scope exists for taking up minor irrigation and land development works such as bunding, terracing, improving small irrigation channels and other soil conservation measures. Social forestry is another programme, though now it has been reduced to planting alien species unsuited to the ecology and economy of the rural areas. The programme needs to be reoriented and implemented under the EGS. Animal husbandry and poultry farming arc other avenues of employment generation.