Bhole, L. M.

Unemployment, Inequality, Entrepreneurship, and other Collected Papers, Collected Papers, Vol. 4

Excerpt (Introduction, p. 1) Many people fear that the New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced in June 1991 by the Government of India would further aggravate an already acute unemployment problem in India. In order to understand this issue, it may be useful to know about the working of special Unemployment Alleviation Programmes, Schemes, Yojnas which have been implemented in India over the past 20/25 years, and about the impact of NEP on these programmes. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to present a systematic review of the operation of these programmes, and to critically discuss the prospects for and approach to them under the NEP. The paper is divided into five sections. In Section I, the origin, evolution, objectives, and main features of special Unemployment Alleviation Programmes (UAPs) are described. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the performance of these programmes are presented in Section II and Section III, respectively.
The NEP’s approach to these programmes is examined in Section IV.
The summary and conclusions arc presented in Section V.