Rural Development and Human Rights in Independent India

The concept of rural development has undergone a drastic change since the fifties. The new stance of the state which appeared with the slogan of 'garibi hatao' is aimed at preventing the rural poor from further sliding into poverty with a further decline in their purchasing power This shift in strategy enables the ruling class to evolve programmes and policies which will appease selected fragments of the poor temporarily, and to divide them by offering specific relief measures to selected target groups and thus diffuses the rising upsurge of the rural masses. It is therefore, misguided to attribute the limitations of the rural development programme to a 'lack of political will', On the contrary, the 'political will of the ruling classes is strongly biased in favour of the propertied classes, and by its very logic will become increasingly more fierce in suppressing movements of the poor.