Abstract

Teki Surayya

Poverty is a situation where people are mainly deprived of income generating activities and access to formal financial system. Strategies to address poverty primarily include promoting opportunity and participation. Poverty amongst forest dwelling communities in India, presents challenge for administrators. Exploitation and ineffective public service delivery are major factors affecting poverty alleviation efforts for Forest Dwellers (FDs). FDs rely on forest for survival. Studies indicate that over 80% of FD depend on Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFP) and 28 to 50% of income comes from NTFP trade, representing just 20% of end user price spread as trade is without value addition. Lack of microfinancial assistance, ineffective administration, hinders value additions. NTFP trade is seasonal, FDs need to borrow money from moneylenders at high interest rates/ NTFP distress of sale. These and non-regulated NTFP markets are contributing to poverty of this groups. Interventions like Self-Help Groups (SHG) movement, based on save and serve themselves. Creating social collateral and group pressure are features of this approach. The emergence of microfinance is strategic option to alleviate poverty. FD now get 38% of their microcredit from SHG. Studies show that adding value by way of making leaf plates can earn 100% average incremental benefit. Poverty alleviation is a multidimensional problem, requires involvement of the Government, NGOs, International Developmental Agencies, people and problem should be addressed multilaterally. There is evidence that participation of people is a strategy as proved in case of Joint Forest Management (JFM) which addressed the dual issue of protecting forest cover and providing income generating options to FD. JANMABOOMI (Motherland) programme of A.P. state Government was also found to be equally successful. On the other programs like IRDP which was financially supported and unilaterally implemented by Government saw limited results. Intervention of public administration need to be supplemented with cooperation from NGOs, who, facilitates value addition and marketing NTFPs, help in forming SHGs, etc. The paper discusses (a) Causes of poverty amongst the forest dwellers and strategies to alleviate poverty effectively (b) Identify the role of public administration and microfinance in alleviating poverty and (c) To find out the impact of participation and empowerment of the people in the poverty alleviation programmes.