“To reduce poverty by enabling the poor households to access gainful self-employment and skilled wage employment opportunities, resulting in appreciable improvement in their livelihoods on a sustainable basis, through building strong grassroots institutions of the poor”
The focus of development planning in India has been rightly on the alleviation of rural and urban poverty since Independence. Rural and Urban India, however, continues to suffer from high incidence of poverty in spite of strengthening of antipoverty programmes in successive years.
There have been several programs addressing rural up-liftment but the desired linkages among he programmes and the much needed focus on the substantive issue of sustainable income generation were missing. SGSY accordingly came into being after restructuring of all these programmes. MoRD Aajeevika / DDU –GKU / Ministry of Textiles / Ministry of Travel & Tourism and Ministry of Social Justice, APSSDC, MEPMA has a definite objective of improving the family incomes of the poor and, at the same time, providing for a flexibility of design at the grassroots level to suit the local needs and resources. The objective of the structuring was to make the programme more effective in providing a sustainable income through microenterprise development, both lands based and otherwise. In doing so, effective linkages have been established between various components such as capacity building of the poor, credit, technology, marketing and infrastructure.