What is novel about Mission Antyodaya?

Announced in the 2017-18  Union Budget, it involves or reaching out to the last man, with  a plan to converge social welfare plans and schemes across ministries and target these to reach individual households. 

It  will involve convergence of various government schemes, sharing of infrastructure and resources and multi-pronged strategies to address target households based on their specific deprivations indicated in the recently published SECCIt means efforts to integrate  schemes from ministries of health, education, employment and social security (insurance schemes under financial services) . 

It is an ambitious programme aimed at lifting 10 million families out of poverty. It is baded on the following reasoning: Over Rs 3 lakh crores are spent in rural areas every year, if we add up all the programmes meant for rural poor from the Central Budget, State Budgets, Bank linkage for self-help groups, etc.  With a clear focus on improving accountability, outcomes and convergence, GOI  undertake a Mission Antyodaya to bring one crore households out of poverty and to make 50,000 gram panchayats poverty free by 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhiji. The government will utilise the existing resources more effectively along with annual increases. This mission will work with a focused micro plan for sustainable livelihood for every deprived household. A composite index for poverty free gram panchayats would be developed to monitor the progress from the baseline. This will be done through addressing all the parameters of poverty and constantly measuring them on a scale of multiple indices based on data collated through the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC). According to the SECC data, which was released in 2015, nearly one of three 180 families in India’s villages—or about 31.2 percent of the rural population—are poor with an income hardly enough to buy even the bare essentials. The SECC analysis used an “exclusion-inclusion” method count the poor, different from the erstwhile Planning Commission’s consumption and calorie intake-based estimates.