Notes NCERT Class 11 Economics Chapter 5 Rural Development

Please refer to Rural Development Class 11 Economics Notes and important questions below. The Class 11 Economics Chapter wise notes have been prepared based on the latest syllabus issued for the current academic year by CBSE. Students should revise these notes and go through important Class 11 Economics examination questions given below to obtain better marks in exams

Rural Development Class 11 Economics Notes and Questions

The below Class 11 Rural Development notes have been designed by expert Economics teachers. These will help you a lot to understand all the important topics given in your NCERT Class 11 Economics textbook. Refer to Chapter 5 Rural Development Notes below which have been designed as per the latest syllabus issued by CBSE and will be very useful for upcoming examinations to help clear your concepts and get better marks in examinations.

Introduction
• Agriculture is the major source of livelihood in the rural sector. Mahatma Gandhi once said that the real
progress of India did not mean simply the growth and expansion of industrial urban centres but mainly the
development of the villages.

What is Rural Development?
• Rural development is a comprehensive term. It essentially focuses on action for the development of areas that are lagging behind in the overall development of the village economy.
• Some of the areas which are challenging and need fresh initiatives for development in rural India include
♦ Development of human resources including
   ♦ Literacy, more specifically, female literacy, education and skill development
   ♦ Health, addressing both sanitation and public health
•  Land reforms
•  Development of the productive resources of each locality
• Infrastructure development like electricity, irrigation, credit, marketing, transport facilities including construction of village roads and feeder roads to nearby highways, facilities for agriculture research and extension, and information dissemination
• Special measures for alleviation of poverty and bringing about significant improvement in the living conditions of the weaker sections of the population emphasising access to productive employment opportunities.

Credit and Marketing in Rural Areas
Credit
• Growth of rural economy depends primarily on infusion of capital, from time to time, to realise higher productivity in agriculture and non-agriculture sectors.
• At the time of independence, moneylenders and traders exploited small and marginal farmers and landless labourers by lending to them on high interest rates and by manipulating the accounts to keep them in a debt-trap.
• A major change occurred after 1969 when India adopted social banking and multiagency approach to adequately meet the needs of rural credit.
• Later, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) was set up in 1982 as an apex body to coordinate the activities of all institutions involved in the rural financing system.
• The institutional structure of rural banking today consists of a set of multi-agency institutions, namely, commercial banks, regional rural banks (RRBs), cooperatives and land development banks
• Recently, Self-Help Groups (henceforth SHGs) have emerged to fill the gap in the formal credit system because the formal credit delivery mechanism has not only proven inadequate but has also not been fully integrated into the overall rural social and community development.

Agricultural Market System
• Agricultural marketing is a process that involves the assembling, storage, processing, transportation, packaging, grading and distribution of different agricultural commodities across the country.
• Prior to independence, farmers, while selling their produce to traders, suffered from faulty weighing and manipulation of accounts.
• Four such measures that were initiated to improve the marketing aspect.
♦ The first step was regulation of markets to create orderly and transparent marketing conditions.
♦ Second component is provision of physical infrastructure facilities like roads, railways, warehouses, godowns, cold storages and processing units.
♦ The current infrastructure facilities are quite inadequate to meet the growing demand and need to be improved. Cooperative marketing, in realising fair prices for farmers’ products, is the third aspect of government initiative.
♦ The fourth element is the policy instruments like
I. Assurance of minimum support prices (MSP) for agricultural products
II. Maintenance of buffer stocks of wheat and rice by Food Corporation of India.
III. Distribution of food grains and sugar through PDS.

Sustainable Development and Organic Farming
• In recent years, awareness of the harmful effect of chemical-based fertilisers and pesticides on our health is on a rise.
• Conventional agriculture relies heavily on chemical fertilisers and toxic pesticides etc., which enter the food supply, penetrate the water sources, harm the livestock, deplete the soil and devastate natural eco-systems

Benefits of Organic Farming: –
• Organic agriculture offers a means to substitute costlier agricultural inputs (such as HYV seeds, chemical fertilisers, pesticides etc.) with locally produced organic inputs that are cheaper and thereby generate good returns on investment.
• Organic agriculture also generates income through exports as the demand for organically grown crops is on a rise.

Conclusion
• It is clear that until and unless some spectacular changes occur, the rural sector might continue to remain backward.
• There is a greater need today to make rural areas more vibrant through diversification into dairying, poultry, fisheries, vegetables and fruits and linking up the rural production centres with the urban and foreign (export) markets to realise higher returns on the investments for the products.
• Moreover, infrastructure elements like credit and marketing, farmer friendly agricultural policies and a constant appraisal and dialogue between farmers’ groups and state agricultural departments are essential to realise the full potential of the sector.
• Today we cannot look at the environment and rural development as two distinct subjects. There is need to invent or procure alternate sets of eco-friendly technologies that lead to sustainable development in different circumstances.