THE RURAL-URBAN GAP AND THE POLICY RESPONSE: A STUDY OF POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIA

The rural-urban gap in development attainment has attracted the attention of many economists. Lewis, Fei-Ranis, and Harish-Todaro models focus on the rural-urban dualism in underdeveloped economies and proceed to illustrate how the economies get transformed in the process of development. When India attained independence in 1947, it was a predominantly rural, agricultural and colonially exploited poor country. During the last seven decades of development effort the country have achieved many heights and got slowly but steadily urbanized. In an attempt to bridge the rural urban gaps in development attainment, Government’s rural development policies got continuously evolved during this period. The present paper traces the changing phased of policy of rural development in Independent India and examines the outcomes of these policies in terms of the trends in the rural-urban disparities in some key development indicators. The study shows a distinct sign of reduction in the disparity over the years.


INTRODUCTION
Disparity is divergence or inequality of character, phenomena or process. Disparity has also been defined as the condition of being unequal. Developmental disparities may manifest across income categories, social categories such as race, caste, religion and gender, and/or space such as continent, countries and region within countries. Disparities of any type has the potential of fomenting discontentment, which can get mobilized into disruptive forces, endangering peace and order in the society and the development process itself, Hence developmental disparities had attracted the attention of social-scientist & policy makers, globally and within countries. Development is universally desired, but often defies a clear unambiguous definition. In economics, the term "development" is broadly understood as a process of persistent improvement in the standard of living for all sections of population in the society. Todaro (1977) defined the definition of economic development in terms of better human life. The main goal of economic development is the improvement in the standard of living of the people which depends not only on per capita income but also on social and welfare services, satisfaction, self-reliance, self-esteem and economic freedom. However all sections of population often cannot access of fruits of economic growth underlying a development process in an equitable manner. Both differences in the beginning and differential rate of access to fruits of development may result in continuation & exacerbation in the levels of living of different people resulting in manifestation & magnification of economic disparity.
The conventional measure of development & disparity are often based on same set of parameters. For instance development measures are often based on per capita income (PCI), attainment of health & education, extend of access to basic services such as connectivity, power, clean environment etc. In the same vein, shortfalls in the same set of indicators can be & often are used to capture developmental disparities.
Disparity is divided into four types-global disparity, interstate disparity, intrastate disparity and rural-urban disparity. The main goal of the present paper is attempt to examine the rural-urban disparityits trends and policy responses in independence India.
The paper is organized into five sections. Apart from this introduction, section 2 deals with the review of theoretical background on rural-urban disparity, section 3 discusses development policy regime in independent India, section. An analysis of rural-urban developmental disparities in the post-independence period has been presented in section 4The final section sums up the broad conclusion of the study.

CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
In India an urban unit or town is defined (according to the census of India 2011) as followsi. All places with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee, etc.(known as Statutory Town) ii. All other places which satisfied the following criteria (known as Census Town):  A minimum population of 5,000;  At least 75 per cent of the male main workers engaged in non-agricultural pursuits; and  A density of population of at least 400 per sq. km.
According to census of India 2011, all areas which are not categorized as urban area are considered as rural area. The National Sample Survey office (NSSO) defines 'rural' as follows: i. An area with a density of population of up to 400 per sq. km, ii. Villages with clear surveyed boundaries but no municipal board, iii. At least 75 per cent of male working population involved in agriculture and allied activities. Rural areas are considered backward areas in terms of availability of basic infrastructure -roads, electricity, water and sanitation facilities, schools and hospitals, etc. In contrast, these facilities are mostly available in urban areas. It is because of the absence of such facilities that rural areas lag behind urban areas in terms of the basic indicators of development -poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, etc.,. Harris-Todaro (1970) was focused on the process through which rural labor would migrate to urban areas in response to wage differentials. Lewis (1954) addressed the issue of shifting incentives for employment between rural agriculture and urban industry. Lewis(1954) notion of the existence of modern and traditional methods of production in urban and rural sectors, the coexistence of wealthy, highly educated elites with masses of illiterate poor people; and the dependence notion of the co-existence of powerful and wealthy industrialized nations with weak peasant societies in the international economy.
The link between inequality and average well-being for two sector economy is known as Kuznets hypothesis (1955Kuznets hypothesis ( , 1963 which maintains that given a two-sector economy with not too distinct degrees of sectoral mean incomes, a perennial shift of population from one sector to another will initially raise aggregate inequality and it will decrease at later stage. This formulation has been labeled as the "Inverted U" hypothesis or Kuznets cycle (Branlke, 1983).
The neo-classical pro-convergence view is bolstered by Samuelson (1948) by bringing in the role of factor mobility and trade, the movement of labor from low-wage regions to high wage regions should narrow wage differences by reducing labor supply in the depressed regions and increasing labor supply in more prosperous regions. Likewise the movement of labor from high unemployment regions to low unemployment regions should narrow unemployment differences. The migration of capital should have the same equilibrating tendency, moving to, or locating in, regions where wage rates are low and the rate of profit high, assuming an inverse relation between the wage rate and the profit rate. Trade between regions is a substitute for migration and will lead to factor price equalization. Myrdal (1957) provides the counter argument, in the form of his cumulative causation hypothesis. He argues that due to industrialization and gain in productivity, rich regions benefit more. He does not deny that growth spreads to poor regions through access to larger markets and trade opportunities. However, he insist that gains are offset by stronger backwash effects generated by deteriorating terms of trade resulting from high productivity gains in industrialization in rich regions. Therefore, the theory predicts divergence in regional incomes. Raj (1990) finds that the disparities in the level of income across rural and urban sectors in India tend to persist because of slow growth of per capita income in the rural sector. The study covered the period between 1950-51 and 1986-87.

DEVELOPMENT POLICY REGIME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA
Several developmental policies has been taken by the planning commission since its first five year plan for developing the rural and urban India as well as for reducing their disparity. The The fourth plan (1969-74) was emphasized on growth with stability and progress towards selfreliance. The fourth plan laid stress not only on various programmes for raising the agricultural output, but also on creating buffer stocks of food grains. One of the special features of Fourth Plan was that metropolitan cities and cities of national importance got special financial commitment which continued in Fifth Five Year Plan (1974-79) as well. It made allocation for Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai especially under integrated urban development programme and some more cities of national importance. The fifth plan (1974-79) has its focus on poverty alleviation and self-reliance. The popular rhetoric of poverty alleviation was sensationalized by the government to the extent of launching a fresh plan-the Twenty-point Programme (1975). Minimum Need Programme was also introduced in 5 th Five Year Plan.

The Decade of 1980s
This was the period of sixth and seventh plans. The sixth plan was launched with the slogan of 'Garibi Hatao'. Some of the major issues addressed by the plan wereemphasis on socioeconomic infrastructure in the rural areas; eliminating rural poverty and reducing regional disparities through the IRDP; 'target group' approach initiated; a number of national level programmes and schemes were launched during the plan which tried to attend to the specific area and the specific concerns of socioeconomic development. Various programmes were taken during this plan for development, removing poverty, and inequality. They were-National Rural Employment Programme (1980) iii. Slum Rehabilitation in cities not covered under RAY. iv.
Capacity building.

One of the ingredients in the new central governments development model is the idea of Smart
Cities. In the budget presented on July 10, 2014, the Union Finance Minister made a budgetary allocation of Rs. 7060 cr. for 100 Smart Cities. The notion of smart cities is a process rather than a goal. A smart city would be e-governed, aim for continuous improvements in design &management, plan for climate oriented development and mass transit oriented development ride on benefits of automation and develop applications for its residents.

TREND RURAL-URBAN DISPARITY IN DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA
From the above section we show that there are various theories supporting convergence on the various indicators of rural-urban disparity, also various developmental programmes has been taken in India since independence for reducing rural-urban disparity. Now we check the trends of rural-urban disparity, using basic indicators of development/disparity -poverty, literacy, infant mortality rate and access to safe drinking water by using secondary data. The data sources arevarious Census reports of India, India Planning Commission, CSO,& NSSO data and RBI website.           From above table and figure we have covered aspects like literacy, infant mortality rate, poverty and access to safe drinking water. We find that literacy rate was only 12.1% in rural India in 1951 and 34.59% in urban India. Improvement rate was highest in the urban areas in the first decade of independence (1951-61) and it was 19.81% in urban areas and 10.4% in rural areas respectively. And Improvement rate was lowest in the 1960s decade (1961-1) and it was only 5.4% and 5.8% in rural and urban areas respectively. In the 2001s decade (1991-2001) improvement rate was highest in the rural areas and it was14.0%; and 6.8% in urban areas respectively. And difference between rural and urban literacy rate have a decreasing trend and the literacy rate was 68.9% in rural India and 85.0% in urban India in 2011 i.e. the difference of 32.3% in 1971, reduced to 16.1% in 2011.   Table 5 presents the rural urban households gap on Access to Safe Drinking Water, which was 25.9 percentage points in 1991, has come down to 8.7 percentage points in 2011.

CONCLUSION
In the present paper, we have examined trends and policy responses in rural-urban disparity in India by considering output indicators-literacy rate, infant mortality rate and poverty; and input indicator-access to safe drinking water in households in India. We found from data that the rural urban gap on the selected indicators has come down. Our findings here point to a very clear policy prescription. Since 1980s there has been a conscious and substantial effort to create enabling circumstances and provide inputs to reduce disparity in several different aspects of developmental inputs like roads in rural areas, education, health labor force participation and special poverty alleviation programme. Rural-urban gap in these indicators showing a decline over time does signify some resolve of policy makers and seriousness of implementation of the plans.