The Minimum Needs Programme

The main goal of India's  development policy has been, till now, growth with social justice. The main instrument through which this was sought to be realised were the successive Five Year Plans. 

By the late 1960s and 1970s it was realised that the benefits of growth did not trickle down entirely to the poorer sections of society. At the time when the Fifth Five Year Plan was being formulated in the early 1970s, more than half the rural population lived below the poverty line. Hence the concept of minimum needs was given a formal shape in the plan. It was conceived as an important tool of rural development. 

The Concept of Minimum Needs and Basic Needs 

Although the minimum needs concept was formally articulated in the Fifth Five Year Plan in 1974, it was not entirely new. Way back in 1957, the Fifteenth Indian Labour Conference had recommended that minimum wages be need based. In 1962, under the direction of Pitamber Pant, the Planning Commission prepared a document setting the requirement for the minimum level of consumption to reach a minimum target rate of growth. It also set out the approach to a minimum level of living or minimum needs. 

The International Labour Office (ILO) in 1976 put forward the basic needs concept formally at the Tripartite World Conference on Employment, Income Distribution and Social Progress. The basic needs concept is also set out in the ILO document Employment, Growth and Basic Needs : A One World Problem published  in 1977. According to the ILO, satisfaction of basic needs included two elements: 

• meeting the minimum requirements of a family for private consumption of food, shelter, clothing are obviously included in this; also, certain household equipment aad furniture, and 
• access to essertial services such as safe drinking water, sanitation, public transport, healtr and education i.e. items of social consumption. 

Other important constituents of basic needs according to ILO are people's participation in decision-making; putting basic needs in the broader framework of basic human rights, fuller employment, rapid rate of economic growth, improvement in quality of employment and in conditions of work, and redistribution on considerations of social justice. 

In India, the approach paper to the Fifth Five Year Plan stated that alleviation of poverty required a multi-pronged attack and suggested a separate National Programme for Minimum Needs. It observed that employment will not suffice in enabling the poor to buy all the essential items of consumption required for a minimum standard of living. Hence employment and income generation measures would have to be supplemented by social consumption and investment in the form of education, health, nutrition, drinking water, housing, communications and The basic needs programme as provided by ILO is wider as it includes private and social consumption as well as human rights, people's participation, employment, and growth with justice. Minimum needs focusses on social consumption. 

Evolution of the Minimum Needs Programme (MNP) 

Here we see how the MNP works and is implemented in India. Let us state at the outset that MNP is not a separate and a single programme. Rather, minimum needs is a concept which has been formalised through an integrated set of objectives, strategies and targets. The programmes of MNP are part of the several programmes concerned and there are no outlays for the MNP in addition to the sectoral outlays. 

In the Fifth Plan, the MNP aimed at : 

1. Providing facilities for universal elementary education for children upto the age of 14 at places nearest to their homes. 
2. Ensuring in all areas a minimum uniform availability of rural public health facilities including preventive medicine, family planning,  nutrition, early detection of morbidity and referral services. 
3. Supplying drinking water to problem villages suffering from chronic scarcity of safe sources of water. 
4. Providing of all-weather roads to all villages having a population of 1,500 persons or more. 
5. Providing developed home sites for landless labour in rural areas. 
6. Carrying out environmental improvement in slums. 
7. Ensuring spread of electrification in rural areas to cover about 30-40 per-cent of the rural population. 

The sixth Five Year Plan (1980-85) saw the concept of minimum needs and the MNP essentially as an investment in human resource development. The Plan saw the MNP as raising the consumption level of the poor and thereby improving the productive efficiency of workers. Thus MNP was seen both as a consumption type identity to nutrition. Nutrition was thus a separate component. Moreover, was Rs. 5807 crore of which Rs. 4927 crore was in state plans and Rs. 833 crore in the Central plan. 

In the Seventh Five Year Plan (1985-90), three more components were added to the MNP package. These were: rural domestic cooking energy, public distribution system and rural sanitation. A total provision of Rs. 11,546 crore was originally made in the Seventh Plan for MNP of which Rs. 164 crore was in the Central Plan. For the three components added later, outlays were provided on a year-to-year basis.